Read Between the Lines

The Kindertransport project brought 10,000 unaccompanied German and Austrian children to Great Britain in 1939. Recent research has uncovered an inconvenient truth: many children suffered abuse, obstacles to integration when their stay became permanent, social estrangement, and forced conversions to Christianity.

One of those children, Martha Braun, was ripped from the embrace of a loving, supportive Hamburg family, and brought into the Manchester home of a first cousin. There she was subject to mental abuse, barred from attending school and made to become the household's unpaid servant until, in her own words, "I escaped."

The historical momentum that brought Martha to Manchester was set in motion over 100 years before her arrival. Elements within Germany began introducing a racial dimension to widespread anti-Jewish sentiment, and the blood coursing through Jewish veins became an indelible stigma making them aliens within the society into which they were born.

Martha's story is not only about the destruction of one family, it is an insight into what can happen when society abandons the standards cementing morality into its social fabric. It is a story for today.