I met my friend Hank Kandler in a German class I took at NYU’s Deutsches Haus in 2009. I was 33 and he was 79. I was trying to keep my German skills up after having spent two years living abroad in Frankfurt, teaching high school English in an international school. Hank was trying to relearn his mother tongue, which he had spoken for the first 9 years of his life and then not again for the next 70. In 1939, at age 9, he was a deportee from Germany to England on the Kindertransport, a massive resettlement program for Jewish children from Nazi-controlled countries.

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Hank was one of thousands of children, ranging in age from infants to teenagers, offered British visas between 1938 and 1939. In a move that made the Kindertransport unlike any other refugee program before or since, the UK barred the parents from entry. The fear was that adults would flood the job market and sponge up public funds; the hope was that at least some children could be saved. The “Kinder” were placed in foster homes and boarding houses across the UK, and their parents were left behind to face their fates, which in most cases meant concentration camps. By some estimates, 90 percent of the children in the Kindertransport never saw their parents again.

Hank, born Heinz in Stuttgart in 1929, was one of the lucky ones; he was reunited with his parents and his brother five years after the Kindertransport, when he was 14, in New York City. He stayed in the New York area, married and had three children, and spent his career as a child psychiatrist. When I met him, he was aging but still vital and deeply engaged with the city, going to concerts and plays, not to mention taking German classes, where he excelled, since he was reawakening his first language.

Hank’s body began to fail him over the years of our friendship, but he never lost his mental vigor. We formed a small German conversation group that met weekly for a couple of years, and then, when everyone but me and Hank moved away, we continued to meet regularly for dinners or outings, often with our NYU German teacher along. In between meet-ups, Hank and I emailed each other with book recommendations, snippets of our own writing, and thoughts on family, aging, and relationships. When Hank died, of Covid, at age 93 in March of 2023, he was still teaching classes at Einstein medical school (over Zoom), and he had made good headway on a childhood memoir.

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Lore Segal, who died last October, was the great literary chronicler of the Kindertransport. Her most famous novel, Other People’s Houses, published in 1964, is a thinly veiled account of her experience of the transport and its aftermath (she makes it clear in a preface to the 1994 edition that only the names have been changed—and only some of the names).

Segal was born in 1928 and raised in a cultured, middle-class Viennese household. When she was 10 years old, after Hitler annexed Austria and the situation for Jews there became untenable, her parents signed her up for the Kindertransport. She stayed in England for the rest of her adolescence, living with her parents for brief stints once they had secured transfer to England as domestic servants (she, like Hank, was one of the lucky ones).

Her descriptions of the wrenching separation of the Kindertransport and then of living in a series of foreign and bizarre (to her) British homes are remarkably similar to accounts in Hank’s unfinished memoir. They both describe the panic and disorientation of the scene at the station, where children were being loaded onto trains, which would take them to boats for the crossing, as parents sobbed and stuffed last-minute snacks into their pockets. (A rotting knackwurst, which Lore’s mother has insisted on giving her but which she can’t bring herself to eat, figures prominently in the early chapters of Other People’s Houses.)

Hank describes being seen off with his younger brother, Gert (from whom he was separated in England): “I remember that our grandfather Paul and our grandmother Rosa came along to the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and that the latter was in tears. And I never forgot our mother’s last admonition to me: ‘Take care of your little brother.’” Segal finds herself walking along the platform in a massive line of children, beside her distraught mother who is carrying her suitcase and trying to keep a smile on her face, “so that it seemed like a gay thing, like a joke we were having together.” And then: “Someone from the Committee, checking the line, took the suitcase from my mother, checked it with the number around my neck, and gave it to me to carry. ‘Go on, move,’ the children behind me said. We were passing through great doors. I looked to my right; my mother’s face was nowhere to be seen.” Just like that, both Hank and Lore are whisked away.

(A 2000 documentary film about the Kindertransport, Into the Arms of Strangers, in which Lore Segal appears, features an interview with a woman whose father panicked at the last minute, reaching in through the window of the train and pulling her out. She stayed with her family in Germany and ended up in the camps. Miraculously, she survived.)

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Both Hank and Lore, just about the same age, were shuffled along from one house to the next during their years in England, relocating whenever there was a new dispensation from a war office or a new school was willing to take them in or simply when someone got tired of playing foster parent. Both had been raised in secular families, but in England they were expected to act as representatives of the European Jews, including—perhaps especially—by English Jews, though neither of them had any idea how to do it—a situation they both find humor in.

Lore, asked if she is Orthodox by her first foster mother, responds “yes” and then hurriedly dashes off a letter to her parents asking, “Would they please write and tell me what did ‘Orthodox’ mean.” Hank, having been invited to dine at the house of the only other Jewish child in one of his English schools, says, “His mother quizzed me about my Jewish religious practices. Coming from atheist parents, I had none.”

As Lore bounces around England, from Liverpool to Kent to Surrey to London, she encounters everything from strained welcome to brittle tolerance to open hostility. At Mrs. Levine’s house in Liverpool, she endures the awkward affections of the matron and her constant complaints about Lore (“That’s all she ever does… Writes letters home or just sits around… She’s got to try and be happy with us here. But she doesn’t even try”).

A couple of houses later, in the provincial village of Mellbridge, she spends her days avoiding a violent brute named Albert, who calls her “Miss La-di-da,” an orphan who the Hoopers have adopted and betrothed to their teenaged daughter. Soon the Hoopers declare the house too crowded, and Lore is moved along to the Grimleys, but when German bombs start dropping in the region, her parents manage to get her relocated to a country home in Surrey. And so it goes.

One of the many homes Hank describes sounds truly Dickensian: a “cold and cheerless” boarding house in central England, filled with all sorts of 1940s characters (who could have been 1840s characters). Hank lived in a small, damp attic room, with a skylight for a window, and kept company with the housemistress, who was gradually going blind. Among the boarders were war workers, brought in from the provinces to fill factory jobs; an impoverished widow and her young daughter; and a dark-haired lady with a suspicious number of male visitors. Hank’s job was to wake this woman up every morning:

Her room was usually a shambles and reeked of the full chamber pot which stood at the side of her bed. Once I heard some whispered gossip that she was a whore—I was almost eleven but didn’t really know what that meant—but when I called, “Get up, whore” one Monday morning, I got more action than I had bargained for. She chased me around her room with her hairbrush, screaming at the top of her voice, “I’ll get you for that, you little fart,” and I barely escaped a beating.

Hank and Lore, two displaced children, are preoccupied with learning the rules and rituals of each new world into which they are dropped, not only a means of survival but also, one senses, as a welcome diversion from what is happening back home. The reality of the war—including the likely imminent loss of the family members and friends they have left behind and the destruction of the cities they have loved—is too great for them to really take in. At the same time, it colors everything they do and see in England. It is both a looming threat and the disaster that has propelled them out into the world on their own, way too young, for no reason that they can comprehend: for being Jews.

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My own upbringing was similar to Hank’s and Lore’s in many ways: urbane, worldly, and decidedly unreligious. Like Lore, who has a deep identification with Vienna, my identity as a New Yorker is more core to who I am than any national or ethnic marker. I always knew I was Jewish, but it was dismissed by my parents as simply my “heredity” and not anything I should concern myself with.

Although my mother’s grandparents on her father’s side had been German Jews, they had come over long before the war, so we hadn’t lost many close relatives. (Her mother’s Ukrainian Jewish family had immigrated even earlier, around the turn of the century.) Besides which my parents were neo-Marxist communitarians, who had mostly cut ties with their families of origin and eschewed discussing their own histories.

When I moved to Frankfurt, at age 31, to teach abroad, I knew only sketchy details about my German great-grandparents. I had no idea that they had met in Frankfurt, where he, a gentleman soldier, was stationed with Otto von Bismarck’s army and she, a simple farmgirl from nearby Kassel, was working as a seamstress’ assistant. His parents disapproved of the marriage, and they ran off to New York.

When I was in my early forties, I found out that my biological father was not the man who raised me—a Jew of Russian descent, who had so wanted to reject his own Jewish identity that he’d changed his last name from Cohen to Newton. My father, in fact, was a man named Ralph Klein, someone I had known growing up—he lived with us in our urban commune—but who had died before I discovered our real connection.

Ralph was born Rudolph Klein in Vienna and raised in a small Austrian village, where his was the only Jewish family. In 1938, when he was 14 years old, his family was forced to flee the village, and Ralph left Austria on the Kindertransport. After two years living on his own in England, he relocated to New York in 1940, and a couple years later joined the war effort with the American army, spying on German POWs and translating their German conversations.

It turns out that Hank wasn’t the first person I’d met who had survived the Kindertransport. It also turns out that, unbeknownst to me for most of my life, I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Kindertransport. In other words, it turns out that I am, indeed, a Jew.

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Ralph, Lore, and Hank—like me—may not have been particularly identified with Judaism, but, when it comes to ethnic and racial discrimination, what matters most is how other people define you. It was Hitler who affixed them to their Jewish identities, and it was the rest of Austria and Germany who fell into line and swallowed the idea that Jews were vermin, despicable, disposable.

In Other People’s Houses, Segal describes visits to her grandparents’ home in the Austrian countryside, where they run a little provision shop on the ground floor. A maid and shop assistant, Mitzi, a country girl with little education who has worked for her grandparents for years, gradually begins to turn on them after the Nazis move into town, emboldened to dismiss them as only Jews.

Eventually, Lore’s grandparents are forced to turn over their home and business to the Nazis—much like Hank’s father was forced to relinquish his textile factory. The novel describes how, after the war, the house and shop are legally restored to Lore’s family, who are all long gone—whether dead or displaced. A now-married Mitzi surfaces and offers to buy it from them at a steeply discounted price. A gloomy check for $800, all that is left of their life before the war, finds its way to them in New York, where Lore and her family have finally settled in a house of their own.

America is no longer a country of refuge but one that is preying upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, including children, who stand to suffer the most from the trauma and terror of this time.

Against the backdrop of all the grand-scale suffering wrought by the Nazis, Segal’s and Hank’s accounts shine a bright light on the particular trauma of being displaced as children and removed from everything familiar. Like so many others, Hank, Lore, and Ralph all survived the war but lost their childhoods. I wonder if they ever ceased being haunted by those years. Although Hank made friends easily, his daughter has told me that he struggled with intimacy when it came to his own children, never able to fully let them in. Ralph became a therapist, like Hank, but it seems to me that he wasn’t able to heal his own psychic wounds.

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It’s striking to consider now that all this pain and trauma was wrought by tribalism, in light of our current political situation in America. The preferencing of one ethnic group and the debasing of another is not the provenance of any one culture. It can show up in any time and place, even in Israel—that very land born of the mass murder and displacement in Europe—and even here in our ostensibly equality-minded nation.

To me, as a Jew, as the offspring (I now know) of a Kindertransport child, it seems the lesson of the Holocaust should not be a continued tribalism in the name of self-protection—exactly the kind of attitude that made the Holocaust possible in the first place, that made Germans so easily turn on their neighbors—or at the very least turn a blind eye to what was happening. The lesson, I think, is rather to look out for whoever is being treated the way the Jews were treated in Europe in 1938.

Though he may justify some recent actions with rhetoric about combatting anti-semitism, Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants, his threats to deport student protesters, and his overtly white-supremacist agenda won’t keep Jews safe. Instead, these postures threaten to dismantle the whole structure of our free society, much in the way Hitler destroyed a more or less free Europe. (I don’t mean to suggest that anti-semitism in Europe started with Hitler, but he made quick work of the Weimar Republic, a functioning democracy with individual protections.) Our fragile freedom is one that Jews depend on for their safety as much as everyone else, and one that we, perhaps more than anyone, should understand the need to protect.

America, specifically New York City, was the final destination for Lore Segal, Hank Kandler, and Ralph Klein, three young Jewish refugees who came here seeking freedom from persecution. America was not without its own homegrown persecution—the World War II era was witness to Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, and much other race-based violence—a reality that might have made the south feel somewhat akin to Nazi Germany for Black people. But the principles the country was founded on and its democratic, progressive spirit held out a certain promise to the rest of the world.

As Segal says, “In 1938, when Austrian Jews understood the meaning of Hitler’s coming, we ran to the American Consulate” (though it was Britain, not America, that opened its arms to Jewish children). Thanks to my mother’s grandparents fleeing to New York at the beginning of the twentieth century and my biological father Ralph fleeing here, for different reasons, 30 years later, I was lucky enough to be born and raised in this city.

Now New York is the place where a Columbia graduate student was recently arrested and removed from his student housing for having protested Israel’s actions during the war in Gaza. We have a president who proudly separated small children from their parents at the border in his first term and is now ordering arrests of entire families, who have homes and jobs and attend schools here, and detaining and deporting them, often under grueling conditions.

America is no longer a country of refuge but one that is preying upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, including children, who stand to suffer the most from the trauma and terror of this time. Jews have seen this before in our history and should recognize the signs. In fact, a number of Jewish people I know are now applying for repatriation to countries like Austria and Germany, in a strange twist of fate, looking for safety.