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A couple of weeks back, I appeared at a festival at Ayot. (That sounds a bit like I’m a wizard. But I kind of like it.) I read from my new novel, The English German Girl, which is about the Kindertrasport. I’ve done quite a lot of readings recently while promoting the book. But this one was different. Appearing on the stage alongside me was Walter Kammerling, a Kindertransport survivor whom I interviewed six years ago, when I was just starting to write the novel. Walter was whisked out of Vienna at the age of fifteen, which is the same age as my protagonist, Rosa, leaves Berlin.

Needless to say, it was an honour to share a platform with such a courageous and inspiring man. At one point, the host, Fiona MacIntosh, asked me to read a few paragraphs from the novel. Then she turned to Walter. “Did that extract ring true?” she asked. “Has Jake accurately captured the mood of the period?” There was a long pause. This was, as they say, the 64,000 dollar question. (What does that phrase actually mean? 64,000 dollar question? Should I google it? Can’t be bothered.) Anyway, my heart was in my mouth. Walter took a breath. “Yes,” he said, decisively. “Jake captured the atmosphere very well.” Relief doesn’t even begin to describe what I felt at that moment.

At the same time, what I felt was deeper than relief. Walter had brought home to me more vividly than ever before the greater meaning of my novel, which is to keep the memory of the Kindertransport alive in the minds of future generations. Or, on an even more fundamental level, to allow people to empathise with the persecuted and oppressed. Walter had travelled halfway across the country to appear at Ayot, determined – even at the age of 91 – to spread his message of pluralism and tolerance. My book, in some very small (and perhaps incomparable) way, is contributing to this effort.

After the event, there was a signing. A few people asked Walter to sign the novel as well. Before long this became the form; I would sign it, then he would sign below. I was humbled. This seemed to be exactly the right way to end such a very unique event.

. . . “I didn’t know of Simons’s work until last month, when the editor of this, his second novel, enthused about it. A few weeks later a copy was pressed into my hands by the publisher, but it’s only in the past few days that I have found time to read it.

The English German Girl is a thoroughly researched recreation of the life of a professional Jewish family in Berlin, under the Third Reich. Herr Doktor Klein is an eminent surgeon with three children. As the net begins to tighten on the Jewish community, he refuses to believe it can get any worse. It takes a belated awakening to the brutal truth before he tries to engineer an escape for the whole family. This proves impossible, but he does manage to find a place for his middle child, 15-year-old Rosa, on the Kindertransport, those now famous trains that were allowed to take a limited number of children out of the country. Rosa is despatched to reluctant relatives in England, from where it is hoped she can find work for the rest of the Kleins. Meanwhile, war draws closer, and the prospects of fleeing grow slim.

I’m not usually keen on heavily plotted or highly researched novels. The English German Girl is both, and although its opening pages are well written and atmospheric, it describes a scene many readers – at first glance – will be familiar with: the sinister advance of Nazism across Germany, and the fearfulness of those who are about to be annihilated with appallingly thorough slowness.

I prefer history told lightly, with scant period detail. Yet there is something distinctive about this story that wormed its way past my prejudices. For a start, the faintly old-fashioned simplicity of style nicely complements its characters and their times. Also, there’s a powerful sense from the start that this is neither a historical novel nor a romance, nor a mere adventure, although it’s all three. Instead, it is an artful fusion of fact and fiction, the author using real events and his own conversations with Holocaust survivors to create a steely, dignified, unvarnished portrait of those times. We might think we’ve read everything there is to know about this era, but Simons offers fresh details that renew the sense of shock.

Best of all, though, and the most important ingredient for any good novel, is the author’s skill with character. He brings a shrewd eye to each, making memorable individuals where it would be easy to rely on circumstances for effect. The result is a story with rough edges and a vital cast which gives it the flavour of real life, creating an emotional pull that relies on the reader’s involvement rather than easy sentiment. This may not be the most summery of books, but its success, I predict, will far outlast the season.”

Holocaust novels, though ‘notoriously tricky’ to write (as author Jake Wallis Simons notes), are not a new phenomenon. Nor are novels about coming of age, or even novels about cultural adaptation; but again, ones that do the genre justice are ‘notoriously tricky’ to get right. To write a compelling novel about all three requires the right balance of control over narrative sentimentality and emotionally believable characters. Thankfully, in Simons, we find a writer who is both respectful and affecting, and in The English German Girl, a story that is both accurate and profoundly moving. Central to the book is the theme of journey and growth, represented by the Kindertransport train that takes its main character out of Germany.

This meticulously researched novel – Simons’s bibliography is impressively extensive – follows young Rosa Klein, the eldest daughter of a once-prosperous German Jewish family whose lives are being picked apart by the anti-Semitic laws of 1930s Berlin. Rosa’s father, Dr Otto Klein, is a secular Jew who staunchly resists being chased out of his homeland by ‘popular hysteria’ and ‘dirty-mouthed’ Nazis until the shocking events of Kristallnachtforce his hand. Rosa is sent ahead to England to stay with Dr Klein’s rather Orthodox cousins, Gerald and Mimi Kremer and their son Samuel, in order to secure jobs and visas for her parents, her older brother and little sister. Unfortunately, as soon as Rosa sees a glimmer of success, Great Britain declares war on Germany, the borders are closed, and the Kleins are trapped.

The novel remains in England with Rosa, documenting everything from the predictable – Rosa and Samuel fall in love, something the Kremers had done everything to prevent – to the truly startling, including an act of violence in the Kremer household that transforms Rosa’s life. Simons’s exceptional control of the voices of the characters gives Rosa, Samuel, the Kremers and the Kleins depth and veracity; Rosa’s progression from pidgin to fluent English is marvellously captured, and the sharp change between the diction of the Kleins and that of the Kremers emphasizes the culture shock she must feel. Though the prose itself is flowing and highly atmospheric, Simons maintains the right level of restraint in the right places; Rosa’s post-war discovery of the fates of various family members is handled with a stunning simplicity that is far more moving than any piece of purple prose.

Various issues are touched upon in The English German Girl, among them the radicalisation of oppressed people, the ease with which prejudice takes hold in the frightened or uneasy, the fetters and virtues of religion, and life on the Home Front of a war, but ultimately this story is about one woman and her emotional and historical place in Germany’s persecution of its Jews and England’s Second World War, and is worth reading just for the strength and truth of Rosa Klein.

Damian Barr explains why Jake Wallis Simons won

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Join Jake Wallis Simons at P&G Wells — the iconic bookshop that nestles snugly between Winchester College and Winchester Cathedral — to celebrate the publication of his new novel, The English German Girl. The evening will feature readings, discussions, and wine flowing like water. An event not to be missed.

6:30pm, May 12  |  P&G Wells, 11 College Street, Winchester  |  01962 852016  |  info@bookwells.co.uk  |  entry and wine: free

It’s a tale of two worlds, of everyday lives upended by crisis. Here is a story that treads the edges of the Holocaust, a touching, and touchy and utterly dangerous business for writers of fiction.

Beginning in 1933, much of the tale is concerned with the Nazi persecution of the Jews in that darkening decade, the 1930s, when Rosa Klein is nine years old and Berlin is still a civilised city where Jews can transact their everyday business in relative tolerance and peace.

Yet, even then, as Rosa ventures to a bakery on an errand for Inga, her mother, clear signs of hatred and propaganda, the shutting down of normal decencies, are apparent. Rosa’s family belong to the trenchant middle class, with a stay-at-home mother, brother Heinrich and live-in maid. Otto, the father, is a well-regarded surgeon who won the Iron Cross in the First World War. He thinks of his family as staunchly German, only secondly Jewish. But when at work he is removed from contact with patients – “in the hospital we are attempting to create an Aryan atmosphere” – he knows the game is up.

His sense of fairness is affronted, his sense of identity undermined. His pride and stubborness — ingrained character flaws more jingoistically German, perhaps, than Jewish — lead to his downfall. When Wilhelm Krützfeld, a longstanding friend, and now the district chief of police, attempts to ensure that the Kleins receive preferential help to secure their safety in the face of the upsurge of anti-Semitic attacks, Otto refuses the offer of help, despite his wife’s pleading. Krützfeld’s wife is Inga’s best friend.

The tale unfolds to the drumbeat of history. Its dramatis personae feature real figures from the time, including Krützfeld and his wife, and, most importantly, the presence of Norbert Wollheim, the driving force behind the Kindertransport which rescued Jewish children from certain death and brought them to England before the war.

Rosa’s removal from her family (she’s then 15) is a pragmatic but also sacrificial act of parental love which brings her safely, and as an emissary, to London. It is the turning point in the novel.

Connoiseurs of crystal clear prose will relish this book as artless art.

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Join Jake Wallis Simons at P&G Wells — the iconic bookshop that nestles snugly between Winchester College and Winchester Cathedral — to celebrate the publication of his new novel, The English German Girl. The evening will feature readings, discussions, and wine flowing like water. An event not to be missed.

6:30pm, P&G Wells, 11 College Street, Winchester  |  01962 852016  |  info@bookwells.co.uk