This thesis paper presents the research and character development process that I undertook to play the role of Eva, in the Pomona College Fall 2012 production of Diane Samuels’ award winning play, Kindertransport. In the ten-months prior to the 1938 outbreak of World War II, nearly 10,000 predominately Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were evacuated to Great Britain to escape the looming Holocaust. The program was given the name, Kindertransport (children’s transports) by German railway officials because only unaccompanied children under the age of 17 were allowed to leave. Once the Kinder arrived in England, host families took them in for what was believed to be a temporary stay. At the time, no one could have foreseen the challenges and consequences for the children that had been separated from their families and heritage. Samuels' play examines the themes of separation, survival and denial of one’s past through the character Eva, who at the age of nine is sent to England on one of the transports. The first part of this thesis concerns the historical events leading to the disenfranchisement of the European Jews, as well as the people and politics that were a part of the Kindertransport rescue network. The second aspect of this paper addresses the staging of Samuels’ play, my character study, and the role preparation that I carried out to play a Jewish German girl from the age of 9 through 17.

Before World War II, many Jewish communities began to worry for their children's safety. As a result, families and Jewish communities in Britain and Nazi- Occupied countries worked together to send their children to safety. Around 10,000 Jewish refugee children went to Great Britain on the Kindertransport transportations from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. These children came from many different nationalities and economic backgrounds and went to many different types of foster homes. Some of these children ended up with Jewish foster families while many ended up with Christian foster families. Same came from religious backgrounds and some came from non-religious backgrounds. While researchers in the past examined the impact of their religion on their adjustment as refugees, not many researched how life as a refugee and a foster child impacted their relationship with religion. To understand the lives of these children fully, historians must examine all parts, including their religious and cultural identities. Considering Nazis persecuted these children and their families for their religious and cultural identities, researchers must examine this to when studying these children and their experiences. When telling their stories, historians must include everything, especially the parts Nazis determined to end. How did they develop their religious and cultural identities considering everything happening in the world around them? How did British Christian culture affect their identity transformation? How did Nazi persecution influence their ideas about their Jewish identity, religion, and culture? The study examined this using a content analysis of 15 oral histories, a memoir, and the documentary film Into the Arms of Strangers. Each child's different life experiences impacted their different identities. This study was not meant to be generalized to the larger public and only meant to be the beginning of a larger study of other Kindertransport children. This particular study only focused on the specific experiences of those studied.

The Kindertransport brought close to 10,000 unaccompanied minors to Britain on a trans-migrant basis between 1938 and 1939. The outbreak of war turned this short-term initiative into a longer-term episode. This PhD is a study of Scotland’s Kindertransport story and an evaluation of the Kindertransportees’ experiences of reception, care and nurture between 1938 and 1945. It also considers the wider implications of the Kindertransport upon the Kindertransportees’ broader life stories after 1945, namely further migration and resettlement. This thesis will unite a number of disparate areas of research, including British philanthropy and welfare, Anglo/Scottish Jewry, Zionism and migrant/refugee studies. It will be shown that Scotland’s reception of the Kindertransportees was highly varied and marked by many different agendas. These were fundamentally responsive to British interests. Growing up in Scotland exposed the Kindertransportees to a variety of different types of care. These were strongly tied to their Scottish context and mirror experiences of the Scottish child in care. Kindertransportees’ nurture invited important changes in their connection to Judaism. Nonetheless, an epitaph to a lost Jewish generation is inappropriate. Zionism emerges as an important Jewish connection. Nevertheless, Kindertransportees did not en-masse adopt Zionist goals or make Aliyah. Yet, at the same time, they did not usually remain in Scotland. Resettlement patterns show that there was a mass exodus of Kindertransportees across the Scottish borders. However, these Kindertransportees still exhibit a connection to Scotland as well as to Scottish communities in the diaspora. They express a profound fondness to all things imagined to be Scottish.

Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Münster--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 205-217.