A Poignant Tale of Tragedy and One Woman’s Courage

THE CHILDREN OF WILLESDEN LANE

Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival

By Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen

Warner

272 pages, $23.95

Mona Golabek’s memoir of her late mother, “The Children of Willesden Lane,” is clearly a labor of love. The book, written with Los Angeles-based journalist Lee Cohen, details the life of Lisa Jura, who fled Vienna at 14 from the Nazis and managed to build a new life for herself in London and later the United States.

Golabek, a well-known concert pianist who lives in Los Angeles, and Jura, also a pianist, were bound by a strong love of music. Indeed, the book is subtitled “Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival.”

We are first introduced to Lisa as she heads to her piano lesson through the prewar streets of Vienna, visions of performing at the city’s Symphony Hall dancing in her head. The young girl arrives at the home of her kind, elderly teacher and performs a Beethoven piano concerto for him, only to have him sadly inform her at the end of class that he will no longer be allowed to teach her because she is Jewish.

Things only get worse for Lisa and her family. It is 1938. Her father Abraham, a tailor, is caught in the Kristallnacht riots and forced by German troops to remove all his clothes and scrub the street--a scene Lisa witnesses from the family’s window. Soon thereafter, Lisa overhears her parents talking about a neighbor who’s willing to give them one space on the Kindertransport, the train taking Jewish children to England.

The family’s oldest daughter, Rosie, is too old to qualify at 20, so the wrenching choice comes down to either Lisa or her 12-year-old sister Sonia. And the next morning, Lisa’s mother, Malka--also a musician--breaks down in tears while informing her middle daughter that she has been chosen. “You are strong and you have your music to guide you,” Malka says. Abraham promises that the rest of the family will join her as soon as possible.

The scene at the train station, where Lisa joins a crowd of children with numbered tags around their necks saying goodbye--perhaps forever--to their families is only one of many poignant moments in this book. But Golabek and Cohen prevent Lisa’s story from turning into a melodrama by balancing the tragic moments with examples of her courage and pluckiness. On the train, while the other children, afraid of a bomb, back away from a basket left in the aisle, Lisa approaches, opens the lid--and finds a sleeping baby. She distracts the German guard so that the baby--who obviously has no papers and is not on the official Kindertransport list--makes his way to safety across the border with the other passengers.

Upon arriving in London, Lisa faces a setback when the only relatives she has in England decline to take her into their crowded home. She spends several months as a servant in a country house--but eager to be with others more like herself, she escapes on a bicycle and ends up back in London in a hostel for refugee children on Willesden Lane.

The hostel becomes Lisa’s new home and the other residents--including Mrs. Cohen, the hostel manager, and her blind, music-loving son, Hans--become her new family. She even finds romance, in the form of a leather-jacketed, rebellious fellow refugee named Aaron.

And, to her delight, the hostel boasts a piano. Soon, in her free time from her job in a garment factory, Lisa is performing regularly for her fellow hostel-dwellers. Mrs. Cohen encourages Lisa to apply for a scholarship to London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music.

But Lisa’s musical and social experiences--in some ways those of a normal (if gifted) teenager--are set against the backdrop of England’s entrance into the war, the bombings of London and Lisa’s horror at not knowing where her family is. Determined to get her younger sister Sonia out of Vienna, Lisa befriends a local Quaker woman, who finds Sonia a sponsor. Sonia arrives on the last Kindertransport allowed through before England joined the war.

Golabek and Cohen pace their story well, with fluid writing and affecting dialogue. Golabek based the book--which should appeal to both adults and younger readers--on her mother’s stories combined with her own research. The result is a portrait of a sweet yet tough young woman of admirable qualities who survives and even flourishes under difficult conditions.

One small criticism: Golabek says that Aaron and another character, Mr. Hardesty, an official at the organization involved in placing the refugees, actually are composites of several people. Lisa’s story is dramatic enough: Why not stick to the facts? But overall, “The Children of Willesden Lane” is a welcome addition to the volumes published on an important subject.