Parents' Guide to We Had to Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport

WE HAD TO BE BRAVE: ESCAPING THE NAZIS ON THE KINDERTRANSPORT opens as the Nazis start their rise to power and anti-Semitism begins to take a violent hold in Germany. Life for Jewish families (even those who were not religious and felt integrated into their communities) would soon be forever changed. Told primarily through the eyes of the children who would be rescued by the Kindertransport, the book recounts how Jewish families began to be treated differently (and often cruelly) by friends, schoolmates, and neighbors and how intense hatred toward Jews soon became the new normal. Parents lost their jobs and fathers were sometimes arrested and sent to detention camps. Synagogues and businesses were burned as neighbors stood by and watched, doing nothing to help. Students were harassed and threatened by classmates and finally expelled from their schools. By 1938, as Jewish families became desperate to flee, nations (including the U.S.) began closing their doors. But the British government agreed to welcome 10,000 children and volunteer groups began to organize a massive rescue mission. Some children came alone, others with siblings. They were placed with foster families and in youth hostels and had to adjust to a new language, new food, and sometimes life with a non-Jewish family. Communication with the families they'd left behind was difficult or nonexistent and at the war's end, many would learn their entire family had perished in the Holocaust. A back-of-the-book section that shares what happened to the children and rescuers whose stories are told in the book.