Abstract
What the Kindertransportees tell us about the acquisition of English
Highlights
Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review
In the first collection of voices of Kindertransportees, We came as Children: A Collective Autobiography, Karen Gershon put together about 250 testimonies in the early 1960s
The outstanding value of the memories gathered in We came as Children is due to the fact that the book conveys the painful nature of the children’s experience with a sort of raw directness that is not to be found in other volumes, as Anthony Grenville remarked in 2012.2
Summary
As has already been pointed out, many of the children were too young to remember and so their later judgement that the process of assimilation had been a success was somehow what they were expected to think This personal perception was reinforced at the social and cultural level, and through the attitude, widely shared among the population of the time, towards other languages and cultures in general and towards German in particular: “The English as a whole were, in the 1930s, still very much islanders, tending to look either inwards or far overseas to their colonies for their points of reference. Ibid., 238–40. Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville, eds, Changing Countries: The Experience and Achievement of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain from 1933 to Today (London: Libris, 2002)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
