What the Kindertransportees tell us about the acquisition of English

The study is mainly based von narrative interviews that I have collected in 2017 and 2018 with people from former Refugee children, among them Kinder of the Kindertransport (1938/39), an almost exclusively Jewish group of migrants to the UK from Nazi Germany, as well as from Austria, Poland and the then Czechoslovakia (vgl. Thüne 2019, Gerettet). In this article I focus on the question what they remember from the process of language learning. And above all, how did they deal with the abrupt change of language and culture? As a linguist, my interest centres on questions such as whether these people – who today of course have reached an advanced age – are still able to speak German, what sort of attitude they have towards the German language, and whether or not they have maintained an active role for it in their families.