Remember Me: A Search for Refuge in Wartime Britain

Susannah D. Ketchum, a former teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan
School in Toronto, serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

Eleven-year-old Marianne Kohn arrives in England on December 2, 1938,
one of the 10,000 Jewish children saved from Nazi Europe by a rescue
operation called Kindertransport. (Irene Watts, herself a traveler on
the Kindertransport, conveys Marianne’s bewilderment deftly.) On the
first night Marianne finds her bed so tightly tucked in she can hardly
get into it. She longs for her “cosy feather bed.” Next morning she
encounters porridge for the first time. English money (in the days of
pounds, shillings, pence, halfpennies, and farthings) is confusing, and
“even English handwriting look[s] different.”

As Marianne struggles valiantly with homesickness and an unfamiliar
language, she is fortunate in finding a sympathetic friend, Bridget, who
has a “knack of knowing what Marianne is really thinking.” Bridget
helps Marianne to write and deliver advertisements seeking the
employment that will allow her parents to leave Germany and join her in
England.

Marianne’s sponsors are another matter. Mrs. Vera Abercrombie Jones
makes no effort to pronounce Marianne’s name correctly, but is
exasperated when Marianne has difficulty pronouncing “Aunt Vera.”
“Uncle Geoffrey,” though kind, thinks being foreign is “something
to be got over, like measles.” Evacuated to Wales, Marianne is
billeted with yet another “aunt,” Auntie Vi. Before long Auntie Vi
asks Mairi, as she insists on naming Marianne, to call her Mam. When
Marianne protests that she has a mother, Auntie Vi replies, “Well,
she’s not a proper mother, now is she, sending you to another
country?”

Remember Me, a Silver Birch Award nominee, is the sequel to the
award-winning Goodbye Marianne: A Story of Growing Up in Nazi Germany
(1995), but can be read on its own. However, those who have not yet read
Goodbye Marianne will certainly want to do so, and all readers will hope
that the series continues. Highly recommended.