There isn't much to see here, I'm afraid. Ruth Kon was raised in a large, religious middle-class family in Germany. She and her younger brother were transported to England on the Kindertransport, and several others had emigrated abroad before the ax fell, but Ruth's sister, two of her brothers and their parents were all killed in the Holocaust.

This memoir, as I've said, is not very detailed and there's little about Ruth's experience as a refugee in England. This is a shame because she was in a quite unusual situation: rather than living in a boarding school or with a foster family, Ruth and a group of teenagers of similar age to her lived in together without adult supervision, first in a Welsh castle, then in a rented home in the nearest village.

I would have loved to know more about that. Like, was there any problem with anybody getting involved in a relationship with someone else in the group? That sort of thing. But there's just nothing there. And the after-the-war bit gets a bit tedious with all the "first I lived in this country, then in that one, then we decided to move back to here, then over there", and "I have eight grandchildren and here are all their names."

There's nothing of what I consider to be truly important. For example, Ruth writes that she and her brother, the one that was also a Kindertransport child, "came to realize" that their parents and siblings that got stuck in Germany did not survive. She writes about receiving information from the Red Cross to the effect that all five of them were shot at Riga. But there's no information about how she searched for them, and how she took the news when she found out what had happened.

Ah well. I'd give it three and a half stars. This book is by no means terrible but I didn't find it especially good either. ( )