The Last Train to London
Page 37
Acknowledgments
My path to writing this novel began on an afternoon more than a decade ago, with my then-fifteen-year-old son arriving home from the Palo Alto Children’s Theater; Michael Litfin, a director Nick worked with, had the idea that a small group of the theater kids he so loved might learn about the little-known Kindertransport effort and write a play about it. My son—generally so voluble—was troublingly silent when he came home from the first of four interviews he and his theater friends did with Ellen Fletcher, Helga Newman, Elizabeth Miller, and Margot Lobree. When Michael died only months later of stomach cancer, the head of the theater, Pat Briggs, made a deathbed promise to him to carry the story forward somehow. Pat, when she was near the end of her life, and with the children by then grown and scattered, allowed me to take it in hand in my own way. I held the silence of my son in my heart as I wrote this story, and beside it, the love of his directors for the children they nurtured.
This book was inspired by and is meant to honor Truus Wijsmuller-Meijer and the children she rescued, as well as the many people who made the Kindertransports possible. I have done my best to remain true in spirit to the facts of the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, and the shockingly rapid change in Vienna society in the few months between the two, including the role of the then-young and ambitious Adolf Eichmann, and the British and Truus’s efforts to bring about the first Kindertransport from Austria. But as this is fiction rather than a history, I have taken smaller liberties in the interest of story. The pure historian will find for example that Helen Bentwich, while a real and important contributor to the Kindertransport effort, did not travel to Amsterdam with her husband, Norman, to appeal to Truus, and that it was Lola Hahn-Warburg rather than Joop who arranged the ferries from Hook of Holland to Harwich. I read and reread Truus’s Geen Tijd Voor Tranen, yet much of the character of Truus presented in this novel is the product of my imagination drawn forward from that spare account of her life.
As Melissa Hacker of the Kindertransport Association suggested to me, “some details of the Kindertransport operation are still a bit unclear.” Accounts vary even regarding the timing of the first Kindertransport from Vienna. Both the Times of London and the New York Times report in very short pieces that the first transport left Vienna on December 5, 1938—the same day on which Truus herself writes that she first met with Eichmann. Truus’s own more detailed account states that she left for Vienna on December 2, met with Eichmann that Monday (which would have been December 5), then made arrangements for the children to leave Vienna on the Sabbath, arrive in Cologne at 3:30 on Sunday (December 11), and ferry overnight from Hook of Holland that same day. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the first Kindertransport from Vienna arriving in Harwich on December 12, 1938, which is consistent with Truus’s account—and the timeline I ultimately determined to use.
Sources I turned to in addition to Truus’s autobiography and the Children’s Theater interviews included online materials and on-site information at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; interviews from the Tauber Holocaust Library at San Francisco’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center; “Interview with Geertruida (Truus) Wijsmuller-Meijer, 1951, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation NIOD, Amsterdam”; Into the Arms of Strangers by Mark Harris and Jonathan and Deborah Oppenheimer; My Brother’s Keeper by Rod Gragg; Never Look Back by Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz; Nightmare’s Fairy Tale by Gerd Korman; Rescuing the Children by Deborah Hodge; Children’s Exodus by Vera K. Fast; The Children of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen; Ten Thousand Children by Anne L. Fox and Eva Abraham-Podietz; “Touched by Kindertransport Journey” by Colin Dabrowski; “The Children of Tante Truus” by Miriam Keesing; and “The Kindertransport: History and Memory” by Jennifer A. Norton, her thesis for the master of arts in History at California State University at Sacramento. Also enormously helpful were Norman Bentwich’s The Found Refuge; and Men of Vision: Anglo-Jewry’s Aid to Victims of the Nazi Regime 1933–1945 by Amy Zahl Gottlieb; as well as films including Ken Burns’s Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War; The Children Who Cheated the Nazis; Nicky’s Family; and Melissa Hacker’s film about her mother, My Knees Were Jumping.
Other sources included Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday as well as his fiction; the extraordinarily moving The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal; The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor; The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity by Robert Pyrah; Becoming Eichmann by David Cesarani; If It’s Not Impossible: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton by Barbara Winton; Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948 by Louise London; Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth; 50 Children by Steven Pressman; Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein; and Jewish Vienna: Heritage and Mission, published by the Jewish Museum of Vienna.
I am indebted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum senior research historian Patricia Heberer-Rice, who answered my queries, and Sandra Kaiser, who facilitated that, as well as to the JFCS Holocaust Center’s Yedida Kanfer, who helped me with research there. The Kindertransport Association, of which I am a quietly lurking member, has provided me much information and inspiration; thanks especially to Melissa Hacker. The Jewish Museum of Vienna and the “Between the Museums” app were helpful in grounding me in Vienna. And visiting the Vienna Kindertransport museum collection of suitcase contents is an experience I will never forget; my gratitude to Milli Segal for opening the collection to me, and for the quiet place to weep afterward.
More thanks than I can properly put into words to the editors who expressed early love for this novel, especially the HarperCollins trio of Lucia Macro, Laura Brown, and my amazing editor, Sara Nelson. Sara’s thoughtful insights, careful attention, and boundless enthusiasm are a writer’s dream. Thanks to everyone at Harper, including Jonathan Burnham, Doug Jones, Leah Wasielewski, Katie O’Callaghan, Katherine Beitner, Robin Bilardello, Andrea Guinn, Juliette Shapland, Bonni Leon-Berman, Carolyn Bodkin, and Mary Gaule.
I am, as ever, grateful for the amazing support I draw from friends and family. I am particularly grateful this time to my son Chris, for getting me the first pages I saw of Truus’s autobiography (and to the Harvard Library for being one of a very few places in the United States to have a copy), and to Murielle Sark for getting me the rest of it and helping me translate passages Google Translate left in doubt. Also to Brian George for digging through the theater locker with me and cheering me on along the way; Nitza Wilon for the early enthusiasm for the story, and Elizabeth Kaiden for her thoughtful read of an early screenplay version; David Waite for help with the German, and for coming down from Berlin to greet me in Austria; Claire Wachtel, for so generously reading, and suggesting the opening author’s note; Mihai Radulescu; Hannah Knowles; Bev Delidow; Tip Meckel; Kristin Hannah; Karen Joy Fowler; the many booksellers who do so much good for all of us, especially Margie Scott Tucker; and my enormously talented photographer friend, Adrienne Defendi.
Brenda Rickman Vantrease, for being Brenda, my best writer pal. Jenn DuChene and Darby Bayliss, without whose friendship I would be a much poorer me. The Four Brothers Waite and the sisters I have the good fortune to have collected by marriage. And Don and Anna Tyler Waite, who have always been there for me. (Mom, as always, thanks for reading.)
Marly Rusoff, for being, always, Marly, agent and friend, whose belief in my ability to write this one from the moment I first began to consider it allowed me to believe too. Thank you, Marly, for helping me in so many ways over these dozen years, and for giving this novel such a lovely introduction into the wider world.
And Mac for reading. And reading. And reading again. For convincing me to stay in Vienna. For your amazing spirit and humor on long walks through Vienna, Amsterdam, and London, and your quiet company in that berth on the night train from Vienna. For keeping me sane, more or less. For everything.
About the Author
MEG WAITE CLAYTON is a New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, most recently Be
autiful Exiles. Her prior novels include the Langum Prize–honored The Race for Paris; The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether); and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, Meg has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face.
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Also by Meg Waite Clayton
Beautiful Exiles
The Race for Paris
The Wednesday Sisters
The Four Ms. Bradwells
The Language of Light
The Wednesday Daughters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON. Copyright © 2019 by Meg Waite Clayton, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Andrea Guinn
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (boy); © Serjio74/olga che/Shutterstock (train station)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-294696-6
Version 07242019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
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