Child of our time

Plucked from the deepest rural Germany, after witnessing the horror of "Kristallnacht" and her family's eviction from its village, Ruth David was sent to England as part of "Kindertransport", one of the few routes to safety and survival for so many children who were to lose their parents in the Holocaust. But survival at what price? As a suspicious "enemy alien" in England at the outbreak of war with little English and few friends, Ruth grew up in loneliness, under the brutal eye of two Viennese ladies who ran the refugee hostel where she lived. The months of war crawled by, and the hostel gradually turned into an orphanage, as the news from the camps first trickled and then poured in. Here is David's profoundly human story, that of a small girl growing into a teenager caught in the vortex of one of the history's greatest horrors.