A Child Refugee and Her Mother

In commemoration of Mother’s Day, I wanted to review a wonderful play I saw in London over the weekend. The play Kindertransport by Diane Samuels personalizes the story of almost ten thousand unaccompanied Jewish children who traveled from Germany to England in 1938. But really the play is about a refugee child and her mother, and the struggle for protection when faced with mortal danger. Although the play’s context focuses on a Jewish child forced by her mother to flee the motherland for safety in a foreign land, the real message of the play is to explore the universal human experience of separation of child from parent, of refugee from the source of their culture. As Diane Samuels puts it, “artists are often drawn to the extremes of human experience in order to reflect also upon what is ordinary…. I was compelled to get to the heart of the unresolvable dilemma. Ask a child if they would prefer to be sent away to safety, if their family is in mortal danger, and he or she will, in most cases, say that they’d rather stay and die with their parents. Ask a parent what they would do in the same situation and most would say that they’d send away their child to be safe. To be a parent is to live with this hidden contradiction. I wanted to try to face it.” I found the play movingly struggles with a child refugee coming to grips with the fact that her mother chose safety for her even at the risk of permanent separation.

In the final scene of the play, the young girl has survived the war and has become a fully Anglicized teenager. The climactic moment comes when this teenage girl, Eva, finds to her astonishment that her mother, Helga, has survived the Holocaust as well, and has come to England to retrieve her daughter. But the daughter has other plans and rejects the mother who “abandoned” her seven years ago. When the mother begs her teenage daughter to come with her to New York to start a new life together, she declines the invitation.

Finally, the daughter Eva tells her mother that she is not going with her to New York. That she can never forgive her mother for leaving her as a young child just to protect her from the threat they should have shared together. She yells at her mother:

Frankly, the play raised questions for me I had never considered. I always assumed that the “right” choice for a parent faced with such a dilemma was the security of a refuge in a foreign land. But what if such security means tearing the child away from the only security they have ever known? Is that the right choice? That is the difficult question Diane Samuels presents in Kindertransport.