The Children’s Train

Sloan, Mica, and Peter carefully mapped the Reinigen Camp so each building was clearly identified. They visited several times to get the visual lay of the camp at Lodansk. To infiltrate the camp and blow up the buildings, they would have to know it by heart.

Before she was arrested, Iron Isha had spoken to two people who had escaped Reinigen in an old potato wagon used to carry the corpses from the camp and dump them in ditches. She’d quizzed them for days as she helped them cross the border into safety. She’d recorded the smallest details of the camp, including even the shaft where the poison pellets went down into the gas chamber. Peter used those notes to add detail to his map. He knew every inch of the Reinigen Camp.

At their last reconnaissance mission, Peter, staring at the vast and secure camp from a safe distance away at a farmer’s barn, thought that Eva might still be captive at the prison. If she wasn’t there, if he was too late, it would be too heavy to bear. Each camp explosion would be a personal tribute to his old friend, Eva, and to the fact that without the Kindertransport this would certainly have been his fate as well, or worse.