Stars of the Night by Caren Stelson

Stars of the Night relates the incredible story of Nicholas Winton and the Czech kindertransport.

In 1938 Czechoslovakia, life for young children in the old city of Prague was good. There were picnics in the park with dark bread with cheese and slices of their mother's sweet honey cake. In the winter, skating on the rivers was followed by a trip to the local coffeehouses for hot cocoa with whipped cream. The children, who were Jewish and eight, nine and ten years old played with friends who were mostly not Jewish. This didn't matter to them. They attended school. Prague was a peaceful city.

But in November of that year, things began to change. Tent camps were set up outside the city, filled with people, who the children were told, were refugees. In Germany, the stores and synagogues of Jews were vandalized and burned. The people in the tents were seeking safety. Soon the Jewish children of Prague found they were being yelled at too. Their parents began to worry, but were too busy to explain. Soon they decided they had to meet the man who was offering to make arrangements. But what man were they meeting in Prague?

In March 1939, the German army entered Prague, with their leader Hitler standing in a car, his arm straight out in front of him. Everywhere the red flags with the black zigzag were hung.

When the childrens' fathers received replies to their letters, the packing of suitcases began. The children were told they were taking a trip to England. And they were told, "There will be times when you'll feel lonely and homesick. Let the stars of the night and the sun of the day be the messenger of our thoughts and love."

The childrens' journey beganat Prague's Wilson Railway Station. The train station was filled with mostly Jewish families who were saying tearful goodbyes to their children as they boarded the trains. At the German border, the children alone, on their train without their parents were afraid of the gruff German police who checked travel documents and searched suitcases. From Germany they travelled through the Netherlands to the English Channel where they boarded boats. After another train ride in England, the children arrived in London where they were welcomed by the English families who would care for them. The children didn't know that the man their parents had written to was a man in London who had made this all possible. 

In England, they soon learned that war had broken out and as the years passed they saw pictures of people being made to wear yellow stars, and being forced into cattle cars on trains and sent to terrible places. Were their parents safe at home in Prague? They didn't know. When the war ended, many of the children were much older, seventeen and eighteen and were able to travel back to Prague to search for their parents. They soon realized that their parents were gone, that they were some of the people put on the cattle cars and sent away.  Many years passed, the children grew up, married and had their own children.

Then one day a scrap book was found with the names and photographs of children, their passports and letters and a plan of escape. In the scrapbook was also the name of the man who organized all this - Nicholas Winton. The children, now older adults, finally met him to thank him.

Discussion

Stars of the Night tells the story from the perspective of  669  brave children, who made the journey from Czechoslovakia to Great Britain just as Hitler began his rampage across Europe. As children, at the time, they didn't really know what was happening in their communities, and in the world at large. They were told they were being sent away, but they couldn't possibly understand what that really meant. These children were part of the larger kindertransport - an attempt to save the children of Jewish parents from inevitable death. One person determined to do that was Nicholas Winton. 

Nicholas Winton was born in 1909 in West Hampstead to parents of German Jewish ancestry. He worked as a stockbroker. In 1938, Winton's life was about to change forever. Germany had taken over areas of Czechoslovakia that were predominantly German-speaking, called the Sudetenland. This was allowed by the Munich Agreement. After this, in November, the Nazis conducted an organized attack on Jewish citizens in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland in what became known as Kristallnacht. As a result, Jewish refugees from these areas began to arrive in Czechoslovakia, on the outskirts of Prague.

Due to this attack, the British government decided to allow children under the age of seventeen from Germany and other areas annexed by Germany, to enter Great Britain. The requirements were that they have a foster family willing to take them in and that there were certain financial commitments made.

It was at this time in December, 1938 that Nicholas Winton's friend, Martin Blake asked him to visit Czechoslovakia instead of travelling to Switzerland for a ski trip. Winton arrived in Czechoslovakia as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, an organization created in response to the refugee crisis in Prague. There he met Doreen Wariner who arranged for him to visit refugee camps filled with Jews and political opponents of the Nazis.

Winton knew of the Kindertransport to rescue Jewish children from Germany and Austria, and he decided to organize a similar operation for Czech Jewish children. He first began organizing from his Prague hotel room and then in an office. Winton soon had thousands of distraught parents attempting to apply. He returned to England to raise money for the transport of Jewish children to England.

The first kindertransport organized by Winton from Czechoslovakia left Prague on March 14, 1939. Seven more transports would follow, these by train and ship, as portrayed in Stars of the Night. When Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain declared war on Germany, the transports ended. Nicholas Winton's remarkable efforts remained hidden until his wife Grete discovered a scrapbook with the names and photographs of the children he saved. In 1988, the year the scrapbook was discovered, the children, now adults, were finally able to meet the man who saved them, on a British TV show.

Author Caren Stelson, who is Jewish, focused on five children from the Kindertransport in her story, giving each a different colour that is consistent throughout. Sisters Eva and Vera Diamantova wear orange and red respectively. Eva and Vera were ten and fifteen-years-old when they left their parents on July 20, 1939 and boarded the Czech Kindertransport to England. Vera would use the diary her father gave her, to write about her experiences and to write down the words her mother told her, about the stars of the night and the sun of the day being the messenger of their thoughts and love for her. Vera remained in England becoming a writer while Eva moved to New Zealand and became a nurse.

Brothers Josef and Ernest Schlesinger are portrayed wearing dark blue and light blue respectively.  Josef was eleven and Ernest, nine-years-old when they left Bratislava to travel to England. Sadly, Josef and Ernest's parents did not survive the Holocaust. Canadians will know Joe Schlesinger as a famous foreign correspondent for CBC. Renata Polgar wears green in Stars of the Night. She was only eight-years-old when she left her parents in her hometown of Brno to live with the Daniels family in Britain. She remembered happy times with this family. Renata was one of only five children whose parents both survived the Holocaust.

The illustrations in Stars of the Night were created by artist Selina Alko with acrylic paint, colored pencil and collage. 

Stars of the Night is a picture book that introduces the Czech kindertransport to younger readers in a simple manner, allowing for further exploration and learning about this event and the remarkable Nicholas Winton who orchestrated one aspect of it. His story demonstrates how one person can make a significant difference in the lives of many. As Joe Schlesinger remarked about Nicholas Winton, "This is the man who gave me the rest of my life."

Book Details:

Stars of the Night by Caren Stelson
Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books 2023