Homelands by Chitra Ramaswamy explores the story of a journalist’s friendship with a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor.

This is a moving book reflecting on friendship and exploring what it means to have a home and to belong. It covers big themes including migration, racism, grief and resilience and shows how our past remains with us. I am looking forward to reading Chitra Ramaswamy's book Expecting: The inner life of pregnancy since I really enjoy her writing style.

I started reading this memoir around the same time I was delving into W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and in some ways, this memoir is quite Sebaldian. Like Sebald, Chitra also employs numerous photographs to recount her life story and that of Heinz Martin Wuga, referred to throughout the story by his British name, Henry. Unlike those of Sebald, the photographs featured in this book are intensely personal. We immediately recognise them as belonging to Chitra and Henry, two unlikely friends from different generations, whom Chitra describes as having Henry akin to having an adoptive grandparent.

There are two layers of stories in this memoir – Chitra’s own narrative of growing up as a child of Indian migrants in 1980s Britain, and the story of Henry, whose tale bears an uncanny resemblance to Austerlitz in many ways. Heinz Martin Wuga was born to a Jewish mother and a gentile father in Nuremberg in 1924. He went to local schools until the age of 10, after which he was forced to move to a Jewish school due to the Nuremberg laws which prohibited him from going to the same schools as “Aryans”. Fearing the growing persecution and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany, in May 1938, his parents managed to send him to Britain with a Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) to Scotland.

In June 1940, Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, ordered the internment of all male refugees aged 16 to 70 from enemy countries – the so-called “friendly enemy aliens", which included Henry. The policy of internment was fuelled by panic and anxiety over the handling of German-speaking people in Britain during wartime. The absurdity of the situation, where someone fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany ended up being interned as a “friendly enemy alien” in Britain, is best described by Hannah Arendt in her essay We Refugees, where she notes that 'contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.'

Unlike Austerlitz, who has no memories of his life before being transported to Britain, Henry Wuga was 15 and had already come of age by the time the Second World War began. In this way, Chitra’s recount of Henry’s story adds depth to what Austerlitz experiences, bringing to light the often-overlooked facts of painful memories of the Kindertransportees. Nearly all the internees under Churchill’s policy were refugees who had escaped persecution in Nazi Germany, and the majority of them were Jewish. Churchill’s policy later sparked debates in the British Parliament, questioning the morality of interning refugees who had escaped persecution, to which the Parliament overwhelmingly voted for their release.

Whilst highlighting the difficulties experienced by Kindertransportees, this memoir also delves into the experiences of migrants and what they had to face to become full-fledged citizens of their adoptive country. Both Chitra and Henry are British citizens, and their lives in Britain are marked by the process of assimilation. Chitra, on her part, could not speak Kannada, the mother tongue of her mother, who originally came from the outskirts of Bangalore in India. Meanwhile, Henry and his wife, Ingrid – herself a Kindertransportee – consistently communicate in English, despite having German as their mother tongue, reflecting their commitment to embrace their British identity. Their journey of embracing their British identity also prompts reflection on what it means to belong. On the question of belonging, Chitra concludes that 'belonging lies in the search' and 'disorientation is the true birthplace of millions of us'.

The author's writing style was very comfortable to read. It felt like a conversation throughout. The book is of three actual parts. We have the story of a German couple as a couple and the way they led their lives in Scotland, the second is their individual pasts, and how they were once refugees at the start of the war, the final third part is the author's own life which she goes back and forth in time and has a few parallels with the first two lives she is talking about.
The content in itself was very interesting, as were the numerous photographs included at the most appropriate times. I would have been more enamoured by the book if the back and forth in time did not get to me. I am usually fond of a non-linear timeline, especially if there is some sort of hidden part that will surface later in time. In this kind of narrative, I would have preferred a more streamlined description since we go back and forth in time as we talk of the Wugas and their experiences, as well as the author's life and their meetings and conception of this book. It got a little too much for me.
Historical documents in the book provide clarity to a lot of facts, and nothing felt like an info dump. I learnt a lot about the bureaucracy that was part of the system in the world when the war broke out.
Apart from the way time was handled in the book, I cannot fault anything else in it. It lingers on intimate family connections and the simple things that make relationships come alive. I would highly recommend this to readers who want to experience a different look into the experiences of some families during the war and how they managed to survive through it.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

My thanks to Canongate Books for a review copy of this book via NetGalley.

Powerful, poignant and beautifully written, Homelands (2023) by Chitra Ramaswamy is part biography, part memoir, also a story of friendship in a sense which explores themes of belonging and identity, home and family and much much more. Although separated in age by five decades, when the author (also a journalist) Chitra Ramaswamy is assigned a story on an elderly Jewish couple, Henry and Ingrid Wuga who had first arrived in Britan in 1939 as part of the Kindertransportees, a friendship immediately develops between the two, one that translates into many conversations and visits, as the two and soon their families bond in part over the thing that ties them, the immigrant experience. Eventually these conversations, the sharing of stories and experiences and along with them the developments in their lives in the present weave together and start forming into a book—the one we are reading. (There is an interesting ‘breaking the fourth wall’ moment with the book being written and coming together inside itself!)

The book can perhaps be described as set essentially around Chitra (whose parents emigrated to England in the 1960s) and Henry, but as is obvious no life is ‘independent’, rather it is tied with many others (family, friends, parents, partners, children, neighbours) and so all of their stories intertwined as they are or become, are what we read. Going back and forth in time, between present, past, recent past, in various vignettes we visit little episodes, small snatches of memory, moments, each bringing with it a gamut of experiences and emotions, and all of which together in their way form a story or several intertwined ones.

Born in Nuremberg to a Jewish mother and Austrian (non-Jewish father), the rising power of Hitler’s party and the increasing violations and dehumanisation of the Jewish community being witnessed every day, means his family tries to send Henry to safety taking advantage of the Kindertransportee programme, which is not the generous venture it is made out to be by the English government—children sent must have some sort of sponsor or one has to be found for the government is willing to bear no expense (besides other conditions as you can imagine). While Henry’s (who luckily does have a sponsor) arrival and initial time in England is comfortable, his correspondence with his family in Germany (even though he is only 15 years old at this time) marks him for the government as ‘dangerous’ and once he turns 16, he finds himself transported from one interment facility to another—some reasonably bearable (pleasant even), others torturous in their conditions and attitudes, essentially a situation Hannah Arendt’s words, which Ramaswamy quotes aptly describe:

… history has created ‘a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends’.

Ultimately freed, narrowly escaping terrible fates (whether the SS Arandora Star on which he well might have landed, or denial of naturalisation—the latter he learns many years later), Henry falls in love, continues his training as a chef (begun in Germany by the foresight of his mother who knew that he would have to be trained to do something given the circumstances) and goes on to build a successful career and life over the decades that follow. While he may be seen as having ‘escaped’ what lay before him in Germany, his life is by no means easy, with various hardships and challenges from the internment camps to later those of language and identity, decisions which illustrate how lived experiences can’t all be black and white, and contributing to advocacy and awareness as Holocaust educators, sharing their stories and experiences as Kindertransportees and as refugees with others who might be unaware or have their own experiences and much more. Reading Henry’s story as he tells Chitra and as she further explores through documents, his lectures, and much else, one can’t but admire and be in awe—not only that after being though so much, how Henry (and indeed Ingrid) managed to do so much (they were active skiers and ski instructors till their late 80s, and Henry was at least lecturing well into his 90s. While Ingrid sadly passed in 2020 aged 96 [she could still thread a needle till a few years earlier], Henry is still with us at 99), but also from the hope that they kept up all through. He has been though much, and yet when he narrates it, he seems to take it far better than any of us ever would.

In fact even reading it, especially of the fates of his family and others (neighbours, people they knew) in Germany, one can’t but be heartbroken (and very angry), and still unable to process how humans can knowingly, intentionally (and clearly sadistically) do what they did, and continue to do so. While we don’t go into terrible detail, it cannot but wrench one’s heart and bring out all emotion.

Alongside is the author’s own story—life as a second-generation immigrant with her own experiences of belonging, racism, her partner and children, the story of her parents, relationship with her family as also loss and grief (another that she and Henry share).

Homelands is of course these personal stories, but interwoven in them are also issues of history, of government and politics—the appalling (yet unsurprising) lack of humanity exhibited and which continues to be so and its counterpart of sorts in society or amongst the general popular in racist and like attitudes.

In telling these stories, the author is not simply conveying fact but emotion, and does this both in her own case and that of Henry by describing the moments in all their dimensions—whether the flowers she is looking on at when told bad news, or the smell and taste of food her mother created, or in Henry’s listening to the music that he speaks of having enjoyed or the scents that he associates with specific moments or people.

In this one interestingly was an unusual bibliography, since not only does the author list the different volumes (also audio, film and journalistic sources) that have inspired her and that she had relied on, but also describes what she got from each—not content as much as approaches, literary devices, techniques, ways of being and much else. These range from W.G. Sebald who forms a pivot of sorts for the narrative to Hannah Arendt, Deborah Levy, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and many others.

Deeply felt and emotional, with moments heart-wrenching and despairing, but also plenty of warmth, love, joy and friendship, this is an account that mightn’t fall within neat categories but is an excellent one to delve into, which will lead to many thoughts and touch many chords.

This book is about two unlikely friends. One was born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, and the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution.

A decade-long friendship that is about belonging, prejudice and family. Homelands are deeply moving and combine and contrast two very different life stories. This book is about the past and the present. It is about the state we're in now and the ways in which we carry our past into our futures.

This book is about homelands and what a beautiful story it is.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Homelands is an amazing book, which is nothing less than anyone would expect from a writer of Chitra's calibre. Heartfelt, moving, wonderful - the story of Henry Wuga and their friendship has resulted in a book to savour and recommend widely.

This was the tale of a friendship that crossed generations and continents and showed that however different our stories might seem to be, we have much in common. Chitra Ramaswamy wove together her own Indian immigrant family's story with that of a, now in his 80s, Jewish World War 2 refugee.

It was moving and well-told and showed that so many things we see in modern day Britain are nothing new. Immigrants have always been a part of the British story and have long been deemed a "problem" by some. Although many might think we opened our arms to Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi threat during the Second World War, we learn that people actually had to be sponsored to enter the UK, as they weren't allowed to be a "burden on the State". Fortunately, many were able to make that journey - even if they then ended up in an internment camp due to being suspected of spying. There is so much to explore in this book and much to ponder.

This book is a labour of love, carefully brought together through Chitra Ramaswamy's journalistic skill. It tells a personal story as well as the bigger story of immigration and trying to become part of a new world.

A thought-provoking and inspiring read.

If you're interested in biography, unlikely friendships, and the conversation around migration and human rights, this will be of interest.
You may have heard of the Kindertransport, and it's often portrayed as a time when Britain was very generous. However, many young people who fled the Holocaust were then treated inhospitably, and this book tells the story of someone who was in the highest security internment camps as a 16 year old.
The author is very present in the text, and her identity and story as a second generation British person allow her to show parallels between Henry's treatment in the 40s and the recent scandals such as Windrush and Go Home vans, and the corruption of those who are given the power to keep people locked in camps when they seek safety.

Homelands: The History of a Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy
Published by Canongate Books
ISBN 9781838852696

In 1939, 15-year-old Heinz Martin Wuga, later known as Henry, arrives in the UK from Nuremburg as part of the Kindertransport program. After some exceedingly traumatic experiences, he settles in Scotland, where he meets his future wife, Ingrid, who is also a Kindertransportee.

A few decades later, an Indian couple immigrates from Bangalore to the UK, where they start a family. One of their daughters is the author of this book. She grows up and becomes a journalist. In 2011, she is assigned an interview with Henry and Ingrid. There is an instant rapport between them and a friendship quickly blossoms. With her assignment over and the close friendship deepening (they come to see one another as adopted grandparents/grandchild), she continues to talk to them about their life stories and starts to see similar themes emerging between their experiences, those of her parents and her own. Eventually, she realizes that this book is taking shape. And a fine book it is.

This seems like an ambitious book—as the subtitle says, it is the history of a friendship. It’s more than that, though. It’s also family histories, political history, life story, memoir, and a history of relationships—both that between the author and the Wugas, but also the relationship the author has with literature, in particular the novel Austerlitz by William Sebald, which runs through the book. Ramaswamy deftly weaves together multiple strands of thought to create an engrossing narrative. There is a lot here and in the hands of a less skillful writer, things could get clunky and confusing very quickly, but they don’t. The writing itself is beautiful, as is the story of this friendship. I was absorbed in both the stories and the writing from the start and this continued straight through to the end. I highly recommend this book—definitely 5+ stars.