Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Remember Me: A Search for Refuge in Wartime Britain
Historical Fiction
For ages 8 to 12
Tundra Books, 2000 ISBN: 088776519X
It is 1938 and eleven-year old Marianne has left behind the only life she knows in Germany to go to England where her parents hope she will be safe. Marianne is one of the children selected to go on the Kindertransporte, a program created to get Jewish children out of Germany and away from the Nazis.
Now that she has safely arrived in England Marianne faces a whole new set of problems. Struggling with powerful feelings of homesickness and not being able to communicate very well, Marianne tries to make sense of what has happened to her. To make matters worse Marianne ends up living with a very unsympathetic English couple who do not understand what she has been through or how she feels.
When the children of London are evacuated Marianne ends up in Wales where things are, if possible, even worse. Marianne cannot help wondering if she is ever going to see her mother and father again or if she is going to spend her life being shuttled from house to house, from family to family, unwanted and unloved.
In this poignant and sometimes heartbreaking story, the author paints a wonderful portrait in words of a young girl whose whole life has been turned upside down. Readers will see what it must have been like to be taken away from ones family and to be forced to live with people who did not and could not understand what it was like to be a German Jewish child.
This is the sequel to “Good-bye Marianne: A Story of growing up in Nazi Germany”
