In 1939, in the shadow of Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, six-year-old Milena Roth was sent away from her home and her loving parents and taken to safety by what came to be know as the Kindertransport, which rescued ten thousand Jewish children from the Holocaust and placed them with guardians in England. When she boarded the train in Prague, expecting to be reunited soon with her parents, Milena was aware of the danger and terror that surrounded her: "I knew I would die if I didn't go."

At the end of her long journey she found a xenophobic, racist society, "an anti-Semitic...