Alison Pick’s Far to Go is the story of families of the Kindertransport children — German Jews sent to Britain in 1938 and 1939 in the hopes of eventual reunification with their parents after the war. The story is told from two different perspectives as well as a collection of letters.

The first is the present-day narrator, Lisa, who begins with the frank admonishment that “There are few things in life... that turn out for the best, with real happy endings.” Second, in 1938 Czechoslovakia, is Marta, governess to the Bauer family, a family that must inevitably decide how much of its identity it’s willing to sacrifice in order to survive, and which concessions are unacceptable. Third, the ominous letters between a number of families who are determined to stay in contact even as they are torn apart by circumstance.

“Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” declared the Nazi party in their goal to unite all German peoples under one nation and one leader — Hitler. The Bauer family’s failure to understand that his words would adversely touch their lives in Czechoslovakia is aggravating, only because we know that each moment they spend in denial — as their friends flee around them — is assurance of their eventual fate. Beyond that frustration, there is sadness. A little boy is humiliated by the children he once called friends, even though those children are only the unwitting reflections of their parents’ beliefs.

The Bauer family is one of many that had placed children on the Kindertransport trains, expecting to see their children after the war’s conclusion. It is stirring to see their optimism, even though we already know how it ends. How can we fault the Bauers for making the choices they did, in the time they had? How could they conceive what Auschwitz and Birkenau would come to mean?

Pick’s gifted portrayal of an academic chronicling the Bauers’ world — inexorably crumbling under Hitler’s tyranny — is as disheartening as it is insightful. It’s a view of human nature’s unwillingness to give up hope. Ultimately, this family’s story, though presented as a fictional tragedy, is in its essence factual. It parallels the true stories of innumerable families, making the experience vivid, heart-wrenching and utterly real.