My Train to Freedom

The first memoir by a member of “Nicky’s family,” a group of 669 children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winston’s transportation network, *My Train to Freedom* tells the trials and tribulations of award-winning humanitarian and former priest Ivan Backer.

As Backer recounts in his memoir, it was 1939 when, as a ten-year-old, he boarded one of eight trains organized by Nicholas Winston and fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for Great Britain. The ninth train was canceled when Hitler invaded Poland, and the 250 children who should have been on it, journeyed instead into Holocaust concentration camps.

Detailed in this page-turning, true story is Backer’s dangerous escape, his boyhood in England, his perilous 1944 voyage to America, and his mantra today. Today, he is an eighty-five-year-old humanitarian and a former Episcopal parish priest. He’s been influenced by his Jewish heritage and his Christian boarding-school education in England, and the always present question, “For what purpose was he spared from the Holocaust?”

*My Train to Freedom* was thoroughly researched. In addition to being shaped by Backer’s own memories, it is based on interviews he had with his mother and sister in 1980, conducted in Czech and later translated into English, a wealth of interviews he had with his older brother and cousin, a study of the Czech film Nicky’s Family, about the transport, and information he exchanged with another “Kindertransport kid.”