cover image Child of Our Time

Child of Our Time

Ruth L. David. I. B. Tauris & Company, $35 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-86064-789-5

As a child of the Holocaust, David was one of the lucky ones: she was one of about 10,000 Jewish children who were taken by train to Great Britain and saved from death at the hands of the Nazis.""As a child I found it difficult to be grateful for this,"" she notes in a foreword to her own children.""I wanted to be with my family, wherever they were...."" She was fortunate in another sense--her four siblings also survived the war. But David never saw her parents again after her departure for England: they perished in Auschwitz. She movingly describes her arrival in London, aged 10, part of a group of""tired, frightened children""; her gradual assimilation into the life of the hostel where she stayed; the strangeness of daily things such as corn flakes, which she had never seen before; up through the beginning of her new life when, at age 17, she left the hostel after the war. David notes she had never spoken about these events to her children. Readers will be glad she decided to share her moving experiences now. 8 pages of b&w photos.