Child of Our Time: A Young Girl's Flight from the Holocaust

by Ruth L. David

Child of Our Time is the inspiring story of a little girl caught in the vortex of one of history’s great horrors. Plucked from deep 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 the Kindertransport—one of the few routes to safety and survival for many children who were to lose their parents in the Holocaust.

Genres: History, Holocaust, World War II, Biography, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2002

Reviews

[Hermien · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has real genuine feel to it and it is important that these stories are told.

[Lorri · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, this is an important read, on many levels.

[❤️Angel Muller❤️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found out about this book by hearing on my local news channel that Ruth David, a Holocaust survivor, had passed away from Covid-19. They mentioned that she wrote a book to her children about her experience. I did a search and found A Child Of Our Time.

I had never heard of Kindertransport. Ruth describes her journey to England and how she was “saved”. No child should ever have to go through what she went through growing up. It breaks your heart.

RIP Ruth David

[Julie Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the true account of the author's family experience during the Holocaust. She tells of her childhood starting out as normal as anyone's, but things began to change early on. Her father operated a cigar factory, which was the major employer in their small German village, but he was forced out of business and lost everything, with very little compensation to help get his family to safety.
Ruth's older brothers left first, one to Argentina and one to the US, both trying to help get their family out of Germany. Her sister Hannah was placed on a waiting list for a place in Holland for displaced children. Ruth was also supposed to be on that list, but she put up such a fuss, not wanting to leave her family, that her younger brother was placed on the waiting list instead. They never made it there, and it turned out to be a good thing, although at the time, that still left her parents frantically trying to at least get the children out of Germany, if not all of them.
ruth, and later Hannah, are sent to England, but they don't end up together. The younger two stay with their parents, so they ended up experiencing some of the concentration camp horrors her parents experienced.
this book tells the story not only of Ruth and her experience as a refugee in England, but also of many of the other girls who lived in the hostel where she was sent. They all craved letters from home, but those letters became less and less frequent, until they stopped altogether.
It took years for Ruth to piece together everything that happened to her family, and there are some things she's had to accept she may never know, but what she does know is quite enough to put together the harrowing tale of not only her family, but of what we know must have been the tale of millions of other people during that time. Some of the experiences might have been different, but the end result was the same.
This book is written in such a way that the feelings of young Ruth as a child come through clearly in the writing. You can feel her fear as tensions mount while she's growing up. You can feel her utter despair as she's finally separated from her family and the terror she feels as others around her receive news of relatives perishing back on continental Europe. You can feel the crushing blow she must have felt when her parents couldn't be found, but yet no one could or would tell them exactly what happened, either. It takes a good writer to put their feelings into what they write, to be felt by the reader, and she definitely does that here.

[MissBabbage · Rating 2 out of 5]

abandoned..

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of meeting Ruth David a few weeks ago and hence decided to read her book. My knowledge of the Kindertransport is minimal but I am sure I was not alone in thinking that life in England without doubt must have been better than the alternative. Whilst the circumstances don't compare in the extremes, this book will break your heart as the price of survival unfolds over seven years. There are so many issues that these children had to deal with which nowadays would involve some form of counselling but at that time were simply not spoken of. For a child to be 'saved' but still treated with suspicion by the authorities and with cruelty by the appointed guardians is tragic. There seem so few glimmers of light in Ruth's time at the hostel culminating with the end of the war and the realities of the holocaust. It is a testament to her determination and strength that Ruth came through this period as a child and continued to face the repercussions even to this day.

[France-Andrée · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting read, definitely heartbreaking. I liked the fact that this book puts a different story about survival from the Nazis out there. I wasn't aware that they were youth hostels for children uprooted from their family by kindertransport. The story here does make the sacrifices for survival all to real... by the ones who did survive and by the one who did not. The parents of Ruth David, the Oppenheimers, saw the reality of what was coming for their family from far ahead and yet they were still unable to have them all leave Germany as a unit.

I think it is important for people to tell their stories, it gives us a chance to understand the past from a witness' perspective... and hopefully it'll prevent it happening again even though with international events that is never a guarantee.

[Ann Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another story of the Holocaust told by a child that escaped Germany as part of the Kindertransport, living in England, not knowing the horror the rest of her family was going through. And living as an unwanted German in England, even if only a child, was more than miserable.

[Cynthia Paschen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done.