Many of the books that I’ve read over the past year or so have been historical novels set in the days leading up to and during World War II. Many, like the two that I featured last month, are based on the experiences of actual people who lived through those dark days. I’ve read stories of women working behind the scenes in the French resistance and children being sent overseas to temporary homes in North America where they would be safe from the bombings in London. Others have been stories of life and death in the concentration camps. Still others have told of people who risked their lives hiding Jews from the Nazis or smuggling food and medicine into the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. My librarian friend tells me that these novels of wartime heroism are a very popular genre at the moment. I find that somewhat surprising during this time of heightened antisemitism when some might even think that the Holocaust didn’t go far enough in ridding the world of its Jewish population. But perhaps it’s also a hopeful sign. It was my librarian friend who suggested that I read this month’s selection.

The Last Train to London

Meg Waite Clayton

Geertruida (Truus) Wijsmuller, a childless member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after Hitler’s annexation of Austria when, across Europe, countries begin to close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape. After Britain passes a measure to take in at-risk child refugees from the German Reich, Tante Truus, as she is known by the children, dares to approach Adolf Eichmann, the man who would later help devise the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and is granted permission to escort a trainload of 600 children (not 599 or 601, but exactly 600) out of the country. In a race against time, 600 children between the ages of 4 and 17 are registered, photographed, checked by medical doctors and put on board the train to begin a perilous journey to an uncertain future abroad. Thus begins the famous Kindertransport system that went on to transport thousands of children out of various parts of Europe during the Nazi occupation of the region in the late 1930s, immediately prior to the official start of World War II.

The Last Train to London is also the story of three fictional children, Stephan Neuman, the teenage son of a wealthy and influential Jewish family who are stripped of everything when the Germans invade Austria, his younger brother, Walter, and Stephan’s best friend, Žofie-Helene, a brilliant Christian girl whose mother edits a progressive, anti-Nazi newspaper.

Although this book really came together at the end and was well worth reading, I do admit to finding it somewhat difficult to follow, especially in the first half, because of the short, choppy chapters that bounce from one character to another.