Deborah Cadbury, drawing on her interviews with former pupils, tells this story with admirable plainness...It makes for a devastatingly affecting and moving book...Her chapters alternate between the nightmarish experiences of Jewish children in the Third Reich, and a kind of earthly paradise; this kindly run English institution with hot-water bottles, a vegetable garden, a gramophone club and Sunday violin concerts in the hall — the latter, as one pupil said, providing 'a unique and orderly situation as far removed from the chaos in Germany as it was possible to be'.
Cadbury has constructed a lively and compelling narrative, although Essinger, deeply compassionate but strait-laced and outwardly rather severe, never quite comes to life as an individual...Many of the attempts to describe the 'Bunce Court spirit' are also a bit vague and idealising but perhaps the most striking is the suggestion of one former pupil that the school was animated by 'a complex amalgam of humanism, the Quaker faith, liberal values and Judaism, brought together by the mind of a woman whose one purpose in life seemed to be to serve children'...Another, who came from an English school where she had just learned about the Tudors and Stuarts, was amazed by a style of teaching that was 'more like a conversation' and required her to write essays on urgently topical issues such as 'American isolation and imperialism'...Cadbury also explores some of the techniques adopted at Bunce Court to try and get through to the more traumatised pupils...On one memorable occasion, gym teacher Hans Meyer was confronted by a boy who, we read, 'responded to his inner turmoil by flying into frenzied rages'...When Meyer tried to restrain him 'with a firm but loving embrace,' he spat in his face...So the teacher told him: 'Go ahead and spit. Let everything out'...The boy just continued spitting, before breaking down into 'uncontrollable tears'...Much of this book is fascinating and moving, yet there is something unsatisfactory about its structure...The second half alternates chapters largely about the school itself with accounts of how some of the pupils were persecuted by the Nazis before they reached Bunce Court...This material is often horrifying, but it inevitably packs an emotional punch that rather overshadows Essinger’s otherwise heroic achievements.
BBC producer Cadbury delivers a stirring account of a German schoolteacher’s efforts to build an oasis for children fleeing the Nazi advance across Europe...Anna Essinger, the headmistress of a progressive boarding school in Herrlingen, Germany, was quick to see the coming horrors of life under Hitler and arranged to bring 70 of her students, some as young as nine, with her to Kent, England, in 1933...Cadbury intersperses daily life at Bunce Court (which closed in 1948) with profiles of Anna’s students, including Sidney Finkel, who saw his father die at Buchenwald; Leslie Brent, whose parents put him on the very first Kindertransport out of Berlin; and Sam Oliner, who lost his family in the liquidation of the Bobowa ghetto in Poland and was brought from a displaced persons camp in Germany to Bunce Court in 1946...Impressively researched and vividly told, this is a captivating portrait of courage and resilience in the face of unspeakable horror.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
