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  • Children's Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport by Vera K. Fast
  • Joanna Beata Michlic
Children's Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport, Vera K. Fast (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), xvii + 270 pp., hardcover, $42.00/£25.00.

In Children's Exodus, Fast joins a steadily growing group of scholars who have written on the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust and in its aftermath. Her book focuses on the immigration of Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from the first Kindertransport in December 1938 to the arrival of the last displaced youth in 1948. Fast's contribution is primarily one of synthesis: she provides engaging and readable accounts of well-known topics such as the British Jewish relief organizations' extensive efforts on behalf of Jews trapped in Nazi Europe, and of lesser-known topics such as the reception of Orthodox Jewish refugee children (including three transports of Polish Jewish youth who arrived in England in February and August 1939); care for young Jewish converts to Christianity in England; and rescue work carried out by the charismatic and controversial Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. [End Page 140]

Fast's presentation clearly shows her abiding sympathy for the uprooted young Jewish refugees of German, Austrian, Czech, and Polish nationality and of varying social and religious backgrounds. She brings to life the voices of the young refugees, their distressed parents, and British officials engaged in saving them.

Fast's chapters proceed chronologically from January 1933, when German Jewish children began to witness the horrors of discrimination and persecution in their homeland, and go on to detail the reception and treatment in Great Britain of young refugees from Nazi Europe. Organized into nine chapters and an epilogue, Fast's work seeks to explain how British Jewish organizations and British society at large reacted to and treated the young refugees, and how, in turn, these young people experienced their arrival to the safe shores of Britain. Many subsequently regarded Great Britain as their permanent home. In addition, Fast analyzes the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish charitable organizations and the individuals who provided these young refugees with temporary homes. She is particularly masterful in her unpacking of the dynamics of conflict among the many British Jewish organizations and individuals of various ideological and religious backgrounds. In this respect, it should be noted that Fast proceeds evenhandedly. She gives credit where credit is due, but is not afraid to show the complexities of character and belief that affected the methods of rescue efforts. Her presentation of Rabbi Schonfeld's rescue efforts is illustrative. Schonfeld was the driving force behind the 1938 creation of the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council (CRREC), which was to become the Orthodox arm of the Kindertransport movement. After the end of the war, Schonfeld was an influential and dynamic figure in the recovery of the second wave of Jewish child refugees—child survivors from concentration and death camps and "hidden" Jewish children. Between 1945 and 1948, he made five trips to Germany and Poland seeking to recover Jewish child survivors from their Christian environments. Using the example of the relentless rescue efforts of Rabbi Schonfeld and the Central British Fund for German Jewry, Fast convincingly argues that the postwar wave of Jewish youth refugees should be seen as a continuation of rescue efforts that originated with the Kindertransport.

The nuance and care with which Fast engages her subject matter is exemplified in Chapter 4, in her discussion of the evacuation, ordered on the last day of August 1939, of two to three thousand refugee children from London to the British countryside. For many members of the Kindertransport, that evacuation proved to be a traumatic one, in that it brought back fresh and painful memories of departure from their own countries.

Fast acknowledges her intellectual debts to those whose works previously have explored various aspects of the wartime and postwar fate of Jewish children—among them Martin Gilbert and Suzanne Vromen. In weaving the synthetic history of young Jewish refugees, Fast proves herself equally adept at integrating accounts from archival and oral history collections and secondary literature. Children's Exodus also [End Page 141] demonstrates the value of...

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