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.

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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.



 


REVIEWS


A Sydney Taylor Notable Book


A Kirkus Best Book


Well-crafted, accessible, and essential. - Kirkus Reviews