Children at the border. Narrative reconstruction of Kindertransport journeys

Abstract

In this article I analyse three narrative interviews that belong to the corpus Flucht und Emigration nach Großbritannien (“Flight and Emigration to Great Britain”), a collection of interviews gathered in 2017 with former Kindertransportees, i.e. Jewish children between 4 and 16 years old accepted as migrants in Great Britain (cf. Thüne 2019). In these interviews, the speakers were invited to give their individual accounts of their journeys from Nazi-Germany or Austria to Great Britain, with a special focus on how they perceived the crossing of the border. The aim of the article is to analyse examples from these interviews in a close reading that – where possible – makes use of Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. I focus on three aspects: 1) how they perceived the border crossing and what they remember of the journey in 1939 in general; 2) what type of text they produced (more a narration or closer to a report in style); 3) what these examples allow us to conclude about the relation between individual records on the one hand and collective and cultural memory on the other.