Staging past and present together on one set, it explores how a mother's act of rescue and a daughter's survival exact a lasting emotional cost. A recurring Ratcatcher figure haunts the play like a fairy tale turned nightmare.
Kindertransport by Diane Samuels is a play set for IGCSE and International GCSE Literature (Pearson Edexcel 4ET1). The board decides the set texts and the years they are examined, and your school confirms them. Our teachers teach whichever text your child sits.
What it is
In 1938, as the persecution of Jews in Germany worsens, Helga Schlesinger sends her young daughter Eva alone to England on the Kindertransport, hoping to follow later. Eva is fostered in Manchester by Lil, a warm working-class Englishwoman, and slowly assimilates, learning English ways and eventually changing her name to Evelyn. When Helga survives the war and comes to reclaim her, mother and daughter have grown irreconcilably apart, and Evelyn chooses her English life.
The play moves between two time frames staged together in an attic. One is Eva's childhood. The other is the present day, when the adult Evelyn's daughter, Faith, finds hidden letters and documents.
They force long-buried memories into the open. A menacing figure, the Ratcatcher, recurs throughout as an emblem of the fear that has shadowed Eva's whole life.
Themes and ideas to track
Memory and buried trauma
The play shows how painful experience is repressed rather than resolved. Evelyn has locked away her German-Jewish childhood.
It takes Faith's discovery of old documents to force it back into the light. Samuels dramatises memory as something that intrudes upon the present, refusing to stay safely buried in the past.
Identity and belonging
Eva's transformation into Evelyn charts the cost of assimilation: to belong in England she erases her name, her language and her faith. The play asks what is lost when a person remakes themselves in order to survive, and whether an identity so thoroughly suppressed can ever be fully abandoned.
Mothers and daughters
Three mother-daughter bonds interweave: Helga and Eva, Lil and the child she fosters, and Evelyn and Faith. Samuels explores the anguish of a mother who saves her child by sending her away, and shows how the wounds of separation echo down into the next generation.
Survival and its cost
Both Helga and Eva survive, yet survival brings guilt, resentment and estrangement rather than simple relief. The failed reunion demonstrates that rescue does not undo damage. The play refuses easy consolation, portraying survival as a burden carried privately and painfully for decades.
How the writer builds it
Samuels stages past and present at once on a single set, the attic, so that the child Eva and the adult Evelyn share the stage and their two timelines bleed into each other. This structure makes memory visible and lets the audience feel how the past presses on the present. The recurring Ratcatcher, drawn from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, is played by one actor who also takes the menacing adult male roles, turning a children's story into a symbol of the threat that stalks Eva.
Objects carry weight, as letters, photographs, a mouth organ and boxes of documents become triggers of memory. Shifts in language, between German-inflected and fluent English, track Eva's transformation into Evelyn.
Studying Kindertransport? The paid trial lesson can start with a key moment from the text.
How to write about it in the exam
Focus on how Samuels builds meaning through form, especially the two time frames sharing one stage. When you discuss a moment, explain how the staging, the doubling of past and present, or the Ratcatcher's reappearances shape the audience's understanding of memory and loss. Analyse method rather than narrating the story: comment on symbolic objects, the multi-role Ratcatcher figure and changes in a character's language and name.
Build an argument around the question, for example on identity or motherhood, and trace it across both timelines, choosing a few telling moments. Weave in relevant context about the Kindertransport carefully, without letting history crowd out close analysis of the drama itself.
An exam-style question to practise
Explore how Samuels presents the effects of the past on the present in Kindertransport.
Plan three points before you write, with a short quotation for each. Then check your plan against the mark scheme section below.
More question angles
- How does Samuels use the figure of the Ratcatcher in the play?
- Explore the ways the relationship between mothers and daughters is presented in Kindertransport.
- How does Samuels present Eva's changing sense of identity throughout the play?
How this maps to the mark scheme
Examiners mark Literature answers against assessment objectives. These are the skills the paper rewards. For Pearson Edexcel 4ET1, the objectives are summarised on our qualification page.
- AO1: Demonstrate a close knowledge and understanding of texts, maintaining a critical style and presenting an informed personal engagement
- AO2: Analyse the language, form and structure used by a writer to create meanings and effects
- AO3: Explore links and connections between texts
- AO4: Show understanding of the relationships between texts and the contexts in which they were written
For Kindertransport, build your argument around “Memory and buried trauma” and “Identity and belonging”. Support each point with a short quotation. Then analyse the writer's method, using the section above.
Keep context about Diane Samuels brief and tied to the words on the page.
Read the text alongside these notes. This page is our own analysis and original teaching material. We quote at most a short attributed phrase where a point needs it, so keep your copy of the play open as you read.
Where to go next
Plan your essay with our guide to planning a literature essay, then see a worked answer in our literature essay structure model response. Browse more set-text notes or read about Literature in English tuition.
When you have written an answer on Kindertransport, a paid one-hour trial lesson lets the teacher who would continue mark it with you.