Context

The Kindertransport, 1938–1939

After the state-organised pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, when synagogues were burned and Jewish homes, shops and lives attacked across Germany and Austria, Britain agreed to admit unaccompanied Jewish children as refugees. In the ten months before war closed the borders, the Kindertransport brought roughly ten thousand children to Britain by train and boat, via the Hook of Holland, exactly Eva’s route. Each child wore a numbered label; each carried one case. Parents made the choice Helga makes: to save a child by sending her away, knowing they might never meet again. Most of those parents were murdered in the Holocaust. Many kinder, like Eva, grew up between identities, grieving in a language their new families did not speak.

Propaganda and the poisoned well

The Nazi state prepared the ground for persecution with years of propaganda that dehumanised Jewish people, most notoriously depicting them as rats and vermin, as in the 1940 film The Eternal Jew. This is the imagery the play deliberately reclaims and inverts: Samuels takes the rat-story the Nazis weaponised and makes its Ratcatcher the shape of the fear inflicted on a Jewish child. The Postman’s cheerful English jibe, ‘Which smells more, German or Jew?’, matters contextually too: prejudice did not stop at the border Eva crossed.

The Pied Piper, twice

The legend of the Ratcatcher of Hamelin, the piper who, cheated of payment, led the town’s children away forever, gives the play its central myth: children taken from parents, a debt unpaid, a town that never recovers. History rhymed with it twice: the Kindertransport itself, and Britain’s own mass evacuation of children from its cities in 1939, officially codenamed Operation Pied Piper, which the play touches when Eva is evacuated a second time. Samuels layers all three, legend, rescue and evacuation, so that Eva is a child led away over and over.

Diane Samuels and the play’s making

Diane Samuels, born in Liverpool into a Jewish family, wrote Kindertransport after encountering the testimony of former kinder, including accounts of how many had buried their histories for decades, some so completely that their own children learned the truth only by accident, Faith’s discovery is drawn from life. The play premiered in 1993 and has been revived continually since; the published edition opens with real kinder’s accounts. The original production’s company explored the Ratcatcher in rehearsal as the embodiment of what each character represses, an idea worth using when you write about him.

Trauma, silence and the second generation

The play dramatises what psychologists studying Holocaust survivors documented: that extreme trauma, left unspoken, shapes the next generation anyway, transmitted through silences, anxieties and rituals rather than stories. Evelyn’s dust phobia and train panic, and Faith’s inherited guilt (‘I’ve always thought it was my fault’), stage this precisely. The 1980s setting matters: it places Evelyn’s generation at the age when many real survivors’ silences finally broke, and their children began asking Faith’s questions.

A play for the stage

Finally, remember the most important context of all: this is a script for performance. Samuels writes for a theatre’s resources, one set, doubling, sound, light, and her meanings live in those choices. The attic set is continuous; the Ratcatcher’s music and the train sounds carry the Holocaust’s trains into an English attic without a word; the two time-frames require an audience to hold past and present in a single look. Coursework essays that treat the play as a novel with speech marks lose exactly the marks that essays about staging collect.