‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ William Faulkner’s much-quoted line from Requiem for a Nun (1951) could be the subtitle for Diane Samuels’s play Kindertransport, first performed in London by the Soho Theatre Company in 1993, which has just opened at the Eternity Playhouse, in Sydney. It is shocking to have to concede that with the many unaccompanied children who have been evicted from their homelands and are on the move today, Kindertransport is more relevant now than when it was originally produced.

In 1938, after the brutal destruction of Kristallnacht made the Nazi’s intentions towards the Jewish population of Germany and Austria horrifyingly clear, the British government was pressured into permitting the temporary admission of ten thousand unaccompanied children into the United Kingdom from Germany, Austria, and later Czechoslovakia and Poland. This presented Jewish parents with a heartbreaking choice – either to send their children alone to a foreign country, with no control over how they might be received, or to keep them at home and face an increasingly uncertain future. Samuels’s play explores the consequences of one family’s decision.