In November 1938, Dutch volunteer Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer walked into Gestapo headquarters in Vienna and negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the release of 600 children, then beat the deliberately impossible Saturday deadline he set for her. This episode examines how the Kindertransport moved nearly 10,000 unaccompanied children out of Nazi territory in roughly nine months, and why the British policy behind it was less an open door than a side window with a 50-pound deposit per child.

The conversation follows Florence Nankivell’s first transport from Berlin, Nicholas Winton forging Home Office letterheads in Prague, Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld’s fish-eating vegetarians, and the children’s journey with one sealed suitcase and a numbered manila tag. It then covers the 1940 internment of older refugees as friendly enemy aliens, the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, the postwar discovery that most parents had been murdered, and historian Jessica Reinisch’s critique of how the rescue is remembered today.

• Why the Evian Conference and the Wagner-Rogers bill left the Kindertransport as the only route out
• How Winton, Trevor Chadwick, and Doreen Warriner evacuated 669 children from Czechoslovakia
• The last ship out of the Netherlands in May 1940 and why Wijsmuller-Meijer stayed behind
• How roughly 1,000 Kindertransport boys were interned on the Isle of Man or deported overseas
• Frank Meisler’s bronze sculptures and the empty space that stands for the children left behind