The Nowhere Sisters
The Nowhere Sisters is the latest addition to the now extensive body of work – literature, drama, TV, radio and even sculpture – inspired by the Kindertransporten. In 1938-9, ten thousand unaccompanied children, mostly Jewish, were evacuated from Germany, Austria and Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain. Most travelled by train, and were taken in by British families who had agreed to ‘sponsor’ them.
The British like to remember this as proof of the welcome they give to refugees, although the reason why the children were unaccompanied was that the British government was reluctant to give the parents visas. Unaccompanied children were OK as they were expected to return home after the crisis. Sadly, this seldom happened, to the great economic and cultural advantage of the British people.
The Nowhere Sisters is really two books. The first covers the years 1938 to 1946 and centres on three girls who grow up together as sisters in a sponsor family in Surrey. Ilse and Margarete are Kindertransport children aged 4 and 12 in 1938, and Judith is the 10-year-old daughter of the British sponsors. This is by far the better part of the book, conveying the fear and bewilderment of the refugees and the tensions between them and their foster parents. Margarete had ‘adopted’ Ilse as her sister on the journey to England, to comfort and protect her, and then had to live with deceit throughout the war years, dreading being unmasked.
The second part of the book covers the next 60 years, following the lives of the three girls/women and their ever-extending families. Like the earlier part of the book, this is narrated episodically, but obviously with much more widely separated intervals. The ever-increasing cast of characters is confusing and difficult for the reader to engage with. I would have preferred the book without the post-war follow-up, The story of Kindertransport is dramatic enough in itself.
