We Had to Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport

Sibert Honor author, Deborah Hopkinson, illuminates the

true stories of Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany, risking

everything to escape to safety on the Kindertransport.

Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf

Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish

families like Ruth’s experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions

and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November

1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of

Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and forced arrests.

Days later, desperate volunteers sprang into action to organise

the Kindertransport, a rescue effort to bring Jewish children to

England. Young people like Ruth David had to say goodbye to their

families, unsure if they’d ever be reunited. Miles from home,

the Kindertransport refugees entered unrecognisable lives, where

food, clothes - and, for many of them, language and religion

• were startlingly new. Meanwhile, the onset of war and the

Holocaust visited unimaginable horrors on loved ones left behind.

Somehow, these rescued children had to learn to look forward,

to hope.

Through the moving and often heart-wrenching personal

accounts of Kindertransport survivors, critically acclaimed

and award-winning author Deborah Hopkinson paints the timely

and devastating story of how the rise of Hitler and the Nazis tore

apart the lives of so many families and what they were forced

to give up in order to save these children.