Before living in a Viennese orphanage, Edeline Thérèse Adler grew up with her grandmother in romantic Saltzburg because her outspoken Austrian father and Dutch mother had “disappeared” in the first concentration camps. Only half-aware of this fact, the young Edeline often remembers her grandmother as a woman with apple cheeks, long skirts and a round, shiny copper tea kettle radiant like the sun.

After her grandmother cannot “be located,” Edeline lives in an orphanage in Vienna until she is put on the first Kindertransport where she meets her role model “Tante Truus” (Mrs. Wijsmuller), a “Lady Leader.”

Currently “Vienna Hütteldorf” station, but in the 1930s Hütteldorf-Hacking Station (pronounced/ Hyu-tal-dowrf Hah-keeng/), this is where the Kindertransports started. Mrs. Wijsmuller had negotiated with Adolf Eichmann that she would be allowed to get a 1000 Jewish children out of Vienna. The reader follows along as Edeline Adler leaves from the Hütteldorf-Hacking Station on the first Kindertransport.

Between 1933 and 1939, these “children’s transports” increased in scale and pace, the more imminent war became. The idea was to get as many Jewish children out of Nazi-controlled territory as possible before the borders were closed. Many of these transports took the children to England. Most of them were organized and/or accompanied by Truus Wijsmuller, who never got the credit she deserved.

The lonely and scared, but spunky Edeline Adler tells herself that she is not a “scaredy cat” when a Nazi starts stealing jewelry from the children on the Kindertransport train. Together with the picture of a phoenix she got from her grandmother, the Chai pendant she hides under her sweater is her most prized possession because it is the only thing she has left of her mother. While she calls it her “little goat” because of the shape of the Hebrew letters, she knows that it means life…