Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,44

Even when I didn’t know I was looking.

In Hitler’s Czechoslovakia, degrees of Judaism didn’t matter. There were families in Eastern Europe who were completely assimilated—ugly word, but that’s what they called it—families who’d had their children baptized, who celebrated Christmas. Even they had very little hope. All that mattered was whether there had been a single Jewish grandparent. People who were estranged from their families, who’d never known their parents . . . all it took was a little detective work on the part of the authorities and they were condemned. And, of course, the practising Jews, the ones rooted deeply in the richness and beauty of tradition, who lit the Sabbath candles and awaited the coming of the Messiah—I don’t have to tell you what happened to them.

They tried so hard, but it was almost always too little, too late. After the Anschluss in Austria they emigrated, but only as far as Amsterdam, say, or Prague. After Hitler made clear his designs on Czechoslovakia, they emigrated again, but this time perhaps only as far as France. In some cases people had exit visas but chose not to use them. While the bulk of European Jewry were begging and bribing, there were those who clung to their homes and their futures, even as those things were disappearing out from under them.

When I was working on my second book, I interviewed the granddaughter of a survivor whose own parents were murdered in Birkenau. “They had exit visas,” this woman kept repeating, as though trying to make it make sense. “Why didn’t they use them?” I tried to explain how her great-grandparents could not have anticipated the death camps, how the Czech Jews especially had enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity, how they thought they were doing what was best for their families and for the country they loved. I could see she didn’t understand, was thinking only of her mother’s suffering and her own terrible childhood as a result.

They can come off as selfish, the survivors and their children. As closed and cramped, dark knots of grievance. That too is Hitler’s legacy: the poison never fully flushed out.

After the war, nobody wanted to talk about what had happened. Things were still difficult by the time I did my doctorate: I remember how hard it was to find willing interview subjects. It wasn’t until much later that the stories started to come out. The survivors were ageing, and it was suddenly understood that if we didn’t hear from them now there would be nothing left to hear. A few of the Kindertransport children started talking then as well, but they were still considered the lucky ones, the ones who had escaped. In comparison to the others, the thinking went, they had nothing worth talking about.

Not that anyone said that directly to my face.

It was later, as the older survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen began to die, that these now-adult children started coming out of the woodwork. The first Kindertransport reunion sparked an incredible reaction. The participants came to understand that they had been part of something larger, pawns in a story for which they had not been to blame. They had been caught inside the giant train of time. They compared notes, and in the end they did not feel so totally alone.

Telling this to you now makes me wish I had been at that reunion. I still would have been an outsider, though. Isolated because my story is different from theirs. The truth is, it suits me being alone. Put me in a crowd and I only feel more lonely. Looking always at the shape of people’s backs. For someone in an orange sweater. For a kerchief.

Could you excuse me, please? I need a moment.

Don’t worry. I’m not about to cry.

It’s like this: since the sixtieth anniversary reunion in London in 1999 there has been a flood of stories about the Kindertransports. The word in vogue is testimony, although that word doesn’t sit well with me, with its implications of a justice system, the possibility of retribution. Still, the things people tell me are often remarkable. For example, two sisters. Their parents took them to the station on the date of the Winton transport and put them both on the train. But the smaller was only a baby, and she’d been sick with a flu that had been going around; at the last minute the parents pulled her off. The older girl remembers handing her infant sister out through the window,