The Berlin Shadow: Living with the Ghosts of the Kindertransport

by Jonathan Lichtenstein

A deeply moving memoir that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son.

In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, upon arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture.

Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behavior. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin.

Written with tenderness and grace, The Berlin Shadow is a highly compelling story about time, trauma, family, and a father and son's attempt to emerge from the shadows of history.

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

320 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2020

Reviews

[Jenny Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Devastating. It took a bit to get into the book at first but at the end I was fully immersed.

[Marci carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read. I’d definitely give it 5 stars. It’s about a man who takes his father back to Germany. They retrace his steps from Germany to England when he was on the Kinder transport! They saved many Jewish children who made significant contributions to British life. Four of his peers on the train became Nobel Prize winners. It’s definitely a must read.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a memoir that in the trailer read seems more about the father than the son. But in process and in form it's exactly the opposite.

Very little of the prose or the form of telling is done in a style I prefer. It's nearly the opposite of timing, progression, emphasis etc. that I like. And I considered giving it 2 stars, but I can't. Plus the last pages were good, 3 stars or more.

I don't know about "living with ghosts" for this history. It is perplexing enough that I took some time to think about it. Of course this heavy history and intense aloneness on top of it, had to be emotional ghosties of sorts. And forever giving Hans the core mistrust or emotional reactions he would have later. BUT!

Honestly, the longer I read this, the more I realized it is the son's mental illness and mood disorders that are the platform of the book. The trip and the prose going to effusive poetry and all kinds of asides (imaginary horses described for the horsepower stats that drive the ship for paragraph after paragraph?) It took way, way too much out of his days of travel legacy and revisiting his Dad's 12 year old journey before WWII. And then that transposed to being hugely about the son's feelings more than the father's.

2.5 stars rounded up for some Berlin intersects with his Dad (Hans) and for the effort and motive of good intent for accompanying the trip and writing the result. But it says too little about that 12 year old and way too much about his past 50 year old son instead. Plus I did not like many of the form directions taken in the telling at all.

The photos were excellent. The one on page 239 of Hans in great age looks so much like my Dad just about the time he passed at 95 that someone else when I showed him thought it was my Dad. Tough old birds who had been through it all. Mine came from Idar-Oberstein Germany when he was 13, but not by himself. And not to England but to Chicago in America. But in that same decade.

Lastly I have read some of the reviews after I read the book. And I disagree that judgment for Hans should be so severe. Child behaviors acceptances, child rearing itself, duty as determined by culture and mores during these times for the parental (or for the child too) all of those had extremely different onus re child abuse or unforgivable deserving behaviors on either side. You cannot judge standards or mores of one time with another and make such determinations as I read here. Hans did well for what he had and held. And he accomplished what he did not by talking about his own victim state and history consistently or ever. Maybe he could never have done both.

[Jill Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The “Kindertransports” were a series of train trips from Germany and Austria which took Jewish pre-teen and teenagers to England in the couple of years before WW2. The children traveled without their parents and went to sponsored homes in England where they were safe during the war. Many, if not most, never saw their families left behind in Germany and Austria again as they were murdered in the Holocaust.

One of the teens was Hans Lichtenstein, who became a doctor, married and raised a family with five children, after settling in Wales. His son, Jonathan Lichtenstein, has written a memoir of a driving trip made by father and son back to Berlin. Hans wanted to take a final visit to Berlin to see places important to him before he’d left for England on the Kindertransport. His son accompanied him, partially to try to understand Hans and the way he’d raised his children, and to see the importance places from Hans Lichtenstein’s early life.

Hans Lichtenstein had a tough life, even after becoming a doctor. He seemed have a prickly personality and was tough on his kids - once throwing a young Jonathan (a non swimmer) - into a pool and then left him to struggle to the surface and survive. There were other incidents with his other children; I think Hans was trying to make his kids “survivors”, in case they ever had to face the same difficulties he did.

The car trip from England to Germany was supposed to be a “bonding trip” between father and son. Jonathan writes an interesting memoir though it was a bit elusive in the text and I found both father and son difficult to grasp on to. I finished the book thinking that even though Hans and his son had reconciled, that there wasn’t a deep connection between them. And maybe there wasn’t meant to be, maybe Hans Lichtenstein just couldn’t be close to his children. Maybe the horrors of the Holocaust were just insurmountable for Hans to recover from.

[Andie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great trauma like the Holocaust does not just the people who are caught up in the horror as it is happening, it also affects family members who were not caught up in the nightmare personally. In this book, the author travels with his father back to Berlin to visit places from his youth, before he was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport.

Lichtenstein has been traumatized his whole life imagining the events of his father’s life that his father refused to talk about. One understands the father’s silence, but the effect it had on his son was devastating. Traveling back to Germany, his father, now in his eighties, gradually opens up about his life healing the rift between them.

This is one of the saddest books I’ve read in a long time.

[Jennifer Schultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read if you: Want an honest, unflinching, and devastating story of the permanent effects of the Nazi regime and the kindertransport.

Librarians/booksellers: This is unbearably sad at times, but rewarding. Purchase for readers that read memoirs featuring complicated parent-child relationships.

Many thanks to Little, Brown Spark and Edelweiss for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The format of this book didn’t really work for me but no one can deny the power behind the words or the pictures that were included.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written story; I especially appreciated this considering I just completed a trip to Berlin.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rated PG. I just started reading this true story of a man taking his elderly father (one of the Jewish children transported out of Germany between 1938 - 1942) back for a visit to Berlin. The second chapter gives amazing imagery that floored me:

(Recalling his father cleaning out his wood stove to use the ashes to fill their driveway crevices): “It was a ritual. First he would sweep up the cockroaches that ran around our black slate kitchen floor onto a steel shovel. Then he would open up the top door of our coal fired range and throw them into its dark red interior. Before he threw them the cockroaches would desperately but noiselessly try to scrabble up the shovel’s cold steel shaft, their mute, keratin legs flailing, entangling with each other, crossed and interwoven and jerking and frantic as they slipped back down the shovel’s shaft and then further, over its scoop, as they attempted to escape the glowing flames behind them. But their struggles were futile. Although one or two dropped off the shovel and raced away, most entered hell in reverse.” Wow. Upon thinking of the plight of the Jews during the Nazi holocaust and what the author’s father escaped, this imagery is quite fitting.

So I just finished the book. Full of metaphors, contrasting imagery and beautiful descriptions, Lichtenstein carried me on a personal journey that is both sad, heartbreaking and yet healing. A must read.

[Joseph J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Won in a Goodreads giveaway. A trip back in time to a country and a painful past. Jonathan Lichtenstein, author of this personal and unexpected work, is a professor of drama and a playwright, and a son, and NOT an historian. If you want a history of the Kindertransport, look elsewhere. Do you want to know the effect of war and separation and loss on a child, it is found in these pages. The legacy of Nazi Germany and the persecution of a people lived (lives) well beyond 1945 transcending time and human life. The author's father is a perplexing man and father formed in a horrendous time. Suicide, family estrangement and dysfunction abound in this story. I am the son of a World War II veteran in the United States, but I recognized the emotional and generational distance between father an son: The awkward handshake, the embrace held back or not returned. That was a generation which repressed its feelings. Emotions here between father and son run the gamut from empathy to resentment to hatred to love. This is a very personal book rich in personal moments: an estranged chain smoking aunt, a distant grandmother, a plagued brother, and a taste for big English breakfasts and German sausages and cheesecakes and bitter chocolate cakes washed down with gallons of coffee. The end brings surprises about the author's father. Does it change your opinion of him? Stay to the end.

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. I had such high hopes for this book and it was such a disappointment. First of all, the description says it's a memoir of a Kindergransport child. It is not. It's the "memoir" of a child survivor's son and the memories they make while traveling back to his dad's hometown prior to the war. There's no mention of the dad's memories of his childhood at all.

[Brenda Jerome · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the book deeply moving and it will stay with me for quite a while. I liked the format - alternating between the story of the author's trip to Berlin with his father and the memoir of growing up in the shadow of his father's traumatic past. I thought it was beautifully written and a poignant representation of the way the pain and suffering of past generations can affect the children and grandchildren.

[Alessia Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straordinario. Possiede un grande talento per le immagini e dettagli. Sa bene che il modo migliore per dar vita al meraviglioso è ritrarlo pacatamente, senza eccessi.

[Lydie THEVENON · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre très intéressant sur les traumatismes qui se transmettent de génération en génération

[Emily Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a startlingly distinct memoir, which took me a month to read because of how close to home it hit for me. The memoir goes back and forth between Jonathan and Hans journeying across Germany and retracing the memories of Hans earlier life before fleeing Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, and Jonathans recollections of his upbringing with a father haunted by a fractured childhood.
Throughout all of this, Jonathan struggles with his own mental health - without naming mental disorders he so accurately describes the feelings of feeling lost to oneself, adrift and desiring nothingness, overwhelming waves of consuming panic - which he sees as being inherently fragile and worsened by being around his fathers volatility in his youth. If you don't like lengthier descriptions of scenery (which are technically unnecessary to the narrative) you will find this boring, but I found these to vividly bring together the scenes of Jonathan and Hans' journey.
The Berlin Shadow captures the unique thing that is living with and loving someone shaped by the traumatic ripple effect of war, someone who refuses to fully acknowledge the emotional damage done to them in childhood, the painful experience of loving someone who is both frustratingly volatile and immensely compassionate. The Berlin Shadow is a testament to the strength of that love, and the gratitude to have had that person in your life.

[Mada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part travel memoir, part the author's own memories from a British childhood, part WW2 stories from his father's time, The Berlin Shadow focuses on the trip Jonathan Lichtenstein and his 80-year-old father make from Wales to Berlin, recreating in reverse the route his father took when escaping with one of the last Kindertransports.

A Jewish father escaped as a child from what would soon become the Nazi hell refuses to have anything to do with the past - he never speaks of his childhood in Germany, doesn't allow his children to learn German and has never returned to Berlin, the city of his childhood... until now, when he finally agrees. The book follows Hans and Jonathan's journey, through the son's eyes, as they progress from Wales to Netherlands to Germany and back; and as they progress through years of unspoken history, his family history, things never discussed about before.

For the audiobook listeners, Jonathan Lichtenstein's voice carries the reader along in a mesmerising voice which goes perfectly with a cup of tea on a rainy day (wrote I as the raindrops pattered on my windowsill...). For the book readers, the book is peppered with pictures the author took during their trip, as well as pictures from his personal archive. Either way, each medium comes with its own personal flavour, adding to the contemplative atmosphere of the whole story.

[Micebyliz]

I've read elsewhere that offspring of survivors can experience PTSD-like symptoms through DNA, perhaps this is another case.
It's a disturbing book. I knew someone who was a child of Kindertransport but we never talked about it. At the time i didn't know much about it anyway and would not have known what to say.
I don't understand why the father was so cruel though. I don't see the need to take out his anger on his children. Many of the saved children were abused in their homes, but many had happy lives and some were reunited with parents and loved ones. Why pass on your trauma to children you supposedly love?
I'm glad they came to an understanding before he died. It would have been terribly hard otherwise.
Of course the parents lied to the children. They had to. They did not want their children's last memory of them to be of them sobbing and weeping at the station but rather smiling and waving. It was all they could do to hold it together as the trains were leaving. As an adult this man should have realized that. I just don't know if i could have let go of my own resentment towards him as his son did. Especially after the pool incident.
But i am glad it worked out. Other people are more forgiving than i am.

[Carlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir of Jonathan Lichtenstein’s difficult relationship with his father, Hans, who was a successful doctor in Wales, but had come to Britain on one of the Kindertransport in 1939 at the age of eleven.
For me, this was an emotionally hard book, as I found Jonathan a difficult person to emphasise with. However, there is trauma, and second generation trauma from survivor’s trauma, and although slow, the book does come together so that I appreciated it.
There might be perceived to be a failed appeal to Sebald, not in the writing, but in the use of black and white photos, and of course the subject matter. But although disturbing, this is a more straightforward story of individual hurt, not a description of a nation’s attempt to not remember the trauma done by it, and to it.
This may all sound a pretty half hearted appreciation, but these are damaged people and it takes me time to understand that damage, not just read about it. And Lichtenstein, however unsympathetically he depicts himself (he’s not a monster, just ... unsympathetic), did help me better understand the damage traumatic events inflict down the generations.

[Jack Risler · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Berlin Shadow, Jonathan Lichtenstein shares a personal account of how trauma impacts families over generations. The story focuses on a car trip with his father ,Hans, a Kindertransport survivor. The book alternates between their return to Hans’ childhood in Berlin and Jonathan’s childhood memories. It openly shows the emotional issues from having a parent still affected by the past. Hans is portrayed as both irritable and loving. His harsh parenting stemmed from his early trauma and a desire to prepare his sons for a difficult world. Lichtenstein’s memoir captures the challenges of loving someone scarred by history. He conveys the emotional distance and problems in their relationship. Overall the book is a touching story about coming to an understanding between a son and his imperfect yet loved father in the face of challenges.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The subject matter is very sad and the horrible stain it left on Hans's life is impossible to describe. Regardless, I found it impossible to like or sympathize with Hans. He accomplished a lot in his life and he helped many people, but his treatment of Jonathon is unforgivable. The incident at the swimming pool was beyond any sense of decency. Hans should have been arrested for attempted murder.

The story was very slow with endless descriptions of what streets they took to arrive at their various destinations. It was hard for me to finish this book.

[Helen Ogar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure how I felt about this book. Learning about the Kindertransport was interesting and for the most part, I enjoyed the writing. The author is a play write and the book is set up as Act I, Scene 1 and so on.
The author is clearly dealing (both successfully and unsuccessfully) with his own demons. Although he eventually comes to a better understanding and appreciation of his father, I sometimes felt he was a bit whiney. Like his own father, I occasionally wanted to say, “Buck up. Get off the ground and quit being such a twit”.
Overall, it is a lovely tribute to an amazing man.

[Nancy King · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible book about an even more incredible journey. This non fiction book entails a son accompanying him father back to Berlin for the first time since World War 2. The father was separated from his family as a young child, boarding the Kindertrain from Berlin to Holland. They retrace the father’s steps. Such an endearing and heartfelt book about this journey, as well as the father-son relationship.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story of a father/son journey back to Berlin after the father at age 12 is one of the last children to escape Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport. The story of his life slowly unfolds as you understand a tiny bit what these survivors went through their entire lives and how it affected now only the survivor, but their spouse, children, and entire outlook on life.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange writing style that is somewhat off putting. The father finally reveals, parsimoniously, pieces of his life (a German Jewish child saved by a seat in the Kindertransport) in this back and forth exploration of the father’s lonely, almost emotionless life, and its sorrowful effect on the life of his son, the author of the book.

[Charmaine Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anti depressants required to deal with this book. It is sad and bad -lacking in humor and largely devoid of light hearted moments. The author bares his soul and this was probably a cathartic experience enabling him to reconcile differences with his father. Ironically though the view that we are afforded is rather narrow. I’m not sure that it was the best idea to narrate his own book.

[Margot Diaz Learned · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a very difficult time with the author. In reality, it was difficult to like either of the men, but it's understandable in both their cases. At least the honesty is here, unflinchingly. An important look at how the insanity breeds more insanity and by confonting it, even on the simplest level, you can make it better; not great, not mind-blowing, but better.

[Frank Kohl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A twelve year old boy. Alone. 1939 Germany. Jewish. Leaving everything he knows. Going somewhere? Unknown. Fast forward seven decades, he returns. So much has changed and yet remains the same.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a good family memoir and Jonathan's story of retracing the path of the Kindertransport that his father took from Germany to the UK is well written and fascinating, an interesting look at a lesser known piece of WWII history.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) A son takes a trip with his father to retrace (in reverse) the kindertransport his father traveled on. The son starts to really understand the ghosts of his father's past and how those ghosts affected their relationship. The trip seems to provide some closure for both of them.

[bryan fothergill · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great book this turned out to be. It started out a bit slow but suddenly got very absorbing. A journey to retrace a journey to find the inner peace so long missing. As much as this book is about the father, is equally about his son and finally realising why his father became the man he was.