Person of No Nationality: A Story of Childhood Loss and Recovery. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Person of No Nationality: A Story of Childhood Loss and Recovery

Ruth Barnett's autobiography starts in 1939, at the age of four in Berlin, when her parents sent her to Britain on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis because of her father's Jewish background. She describes, in wonderful detail, her early memories of Germany, and how she grew up a farm girl, in rural southern England, not knowing for sure if her parents were alive or dead. She had three sets of foster families, each of whom she thought were going to adopt her, when her parents unexpectedly turned up, in 1949, and, against her will, forced her to return to Germany. Her father, who was a judge in Mainz had taken out a court order to bring her 'home'. Ruth found this very traumatic. She later learns that he had converted to Christianity before the war but still had to flee to Shanghai to escape the Nazis. But her mother, who was not Jewish, had stayed in Germany and joined in protests against deportations. Her account is full of fascinating insights and observations - of her search for her identity, her difficult relationship with her parents, many arguments with them when she decided to convert to Judaism and marry a Jewish man, and her experience of living in Britain and in Germany after the war in the shadow of the Holocaust. She describes how her subsequent career as a teacher and psychotherapist was affected by her early experiences but her expertise also enables her to recall her conflicting feelings as she felt them at the time in an authentic way and she shows how she channelled her energies to make a successful life and career for herself. She now gives talks about the Holocaust and shares her testimony in schools and colleges. She will be talking about her book at Jewish Book Week, London on March 3rd, 2010.

Born in 1935 in Berlin as Ruth Michaelis, the author came to England on the Kindertransport in 1939 spending the next 10 years with foster parents. She went to Petersfield High School and in 1953 she went to Reading University where she studied dairying and met her future husband, Bernard Barnett, a psychoanalyst. In 1958 she converted to Judaism. She had a career as a secondary school teacher for 19 years focuisng on children with adjustment problems, including seven years as deputy head of Reynolds High School in Acton, London. She retired from teaching in 1986 to set up her own psychotherapy practice and worked with members of families affected by the Holocaust. Today, she links these two main themes in projects on Holocaust education in Germany and Great Britain. She has three children and lives in West Hampstead in London. Select Bibliography: Books People Making People: Child Development in Context, by Ruth Barnett published by Nelson Thornes Ltd, 1985. Articles The Acculturation of the Kindertransport Children: Intergenerational Dialogue on the Kindertransport Experience paper in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23:1, pps101-108 (2004) Children: The Invisible Victims of War" edited by Dr Martin Parsons, published by DCM in 2008. (chapter on the Kindertransport)