Welcome to Litsy!

The heart of this book is the love story, a 75 year marriage between Ingrid & Henry Wuga, German refugees who met in the UK as teenagers when both were rescued on the Kindertransport. While I loved how the author befriended the couple and then went on to research & tell their story,I was a little overwhelmed by her insertion of own story, a first generation British citizen of Indian descent.
A blending of memoir & history the story 👇🏼

Returning to this book that I started back in February. It‘s such a lovely story about a friendship between the author and an elderly Jewish couple who fled Nazi persecution and were sent to the UK on the Kindertransport. It was #giftedtome by @TrishB who always sends me the best NF books xxx

THANK YOU @TrishB 😘😘❣️This book sounds FABULOUS 🥰 Such a wonderful surprise and I love the subtitle: The history of a friendship 💕💕💕Can‘t wait to read this when I get back 😍

A touching read, as the author recreates the experiences of two kindertransportees, then in their 90s. This is mingled with her own experiences of mourning and lockdown. Made me a bit damp eyed by the end, as one survivor is left alone.

I picture this indefatigable couple shuffling down the broad leafy streets of Giffnock, dutifully keeping their distance from passers-by. I think of all they have walked together. I remember how two years earlier, when Ingrid was in hospital with an irregular heartbeat, she charmed the nurses by replying when they asked to listen to her heart, 'You can't have it. It belongs to Henry.'

😍

In my bag is an old sweet-smelling copy of Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse, one of my parents' favourite authors.....Possessors of what Rushdie calls the 'partial and plural perspective of the migrant', an outlook written on the spines of their often vertically arranged bookshelves. Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Miss Read, Dickens, the Bhagavad Gita, Somerset Maugham, Ruth Rendell, D. H. Lawrence, Arundhati Roy, the Upanishads....

....the British government...classified as illegal immigrants thousands of British Caribbean residents who arrived in the country between 1948 and 1973.
When Henry's [FOI] file [about the govt wish to deport him after he fled the Holocaust] arrives in the post, Windrush no longer stands for history. It represents....betrayal of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people...

The letter landing softly, the lightest of terrors, on the mat.