Nazis again

Relatively few people remain alive who even remember the Nazis — I can remember the Eichmann trial, but that's as good as I can do — yet Nazis remain one of the most frequent and most popular subjects for books, both fiction and nonfiction. They are about as close to absolute evil as we can imagine, and pure evil fascinates us all.

Meg Waite Clayton, much too young to remember the Nazis, writes a compelling novel on the subject nonetheless, The Last Train to London (2019). Much of her fiction is truth. A Dutch woman named Truus Wijsmuller really did help rescue thousands of children, most of them Jewish, from Germany and Nazi-occupied territory.

Clayton's novel focuses on three children, two of them teenagers, in Vienna in the late 1930s. Stephan Neuman, son of a Jewish chocolatier, aspires to become a writer. He is in love with Zofie-Helene, not a Jew but the daughter of a controversial journalist — controversial because she tells the truth about the growing Nazi menace and the persecution of Jews. Zofie, a mathematical genius, equally loves Stephan, the only boy who doesn't think she's weird. The other is five-year-old Walter, Stephan's brother, who expresses his feelings through his stuffed rabbit, Peter.

The author builds the suspense gradually, as Stephan's father is captured by the Nazis and Stephan himself goes into hiding in the sewers. Meanwhile Zofie's mother is imprisoned for what she has written. Tante Truus, as she asks all the children to call her, goes to Austria to make a deal with Adolf Eichmann himself. He allows her to take 600 children by train — but it must be exactly 600 children, no more or no less. Or else none will be allowed out of the country.

How Stephan, Walter and Zofie — plus a surprising 601st child — make it to London rounds out her fine, quick-moving  story.