Karen Gershon is best known in her adopted country of England as a poet and chronicler of the Kindertransport (children's transportation), a program by which young refugees escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939 and were brought to Britain. The experience of losing both parents in the Holocaust, while she was safe in Britain, dominated Gershon's outlook. Many of her works are autobiographical. Recurrent themes in Gershon's novels, poetry, and autobiography are survivor's guilt, exile, and yearning for a lost home. Such yearning often finds expression in support for Israel as a home for the Jews, where she herself lived from 1968 to 1973.

Gershon was born Kaethe Loewenthal on 29 August 1923 in Bielefeld, in the province of Westphalia, Germany. The family was middle-class: Gershon's father, Paul Loewenthal, was an architect, and her mother, Selma (née Schoenfeld) Loewenthal, was a housewife. There were three children: Anne, Kaethe, and Lise. When Adolf...