Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II

Max in the House of Spies is set in 1939-1940 against the historical backdrop of World War II, which started on September 1, 1939. The novel interweaves the fictional experiences of Max with numerous historical events, people, and facts to inform the reader about this important turning-point in history and to explore its wider meaning and impact.

Although much of Max’s story is fantastical, the novel is closely researched and draws on the real histories and experiences of those living at the time. Through Max, the novel is especially situated within the experience of Jewish German child refugees in Britain, as the novel opens with Max leaving his parents in Berlin as part of the Kindertransport program. The Kindertransport was a British effort to resettle children, predominantly Jewish, who were identified as under threat in Nazi-occupied territory. Between November 1938 and September 1939, when the outbreak of war halted the program, nearly 10,000 children were brought to Britain to be housed with British families.

Kindertransport was precipitated by Kristallnacht, or “the night of the broken glass” (138), a 1938 Nazi-led pogrom against Jewish communities in which Jewish-owned properties and synagogues were attacked, Jewish people were killed and assaulted, and 30,000 Jewish men were incarcerated in concentration camps. (Taylor, Alan. “World War II: Before the War,” The Atlantic, 19 Jun. 2011.) Kristallnacht is recognized as a precursor to what would become the Nazi Holocaust. Max’s account of Kristallnacht, in which his family’s building is damaged, and his father is taken to a camp, returning days later with signs of physical abuse, embeds these real events into the fictional narrative. As the novel reveals, rising antisemitism and state-led discrimination within Nazi territory deliberately made life increasingly unsustainable for Jewish people: When Max’s father’s shop is removed from his ownership and his parents struggle to make a living, the novel reflects the realities of life under a political and legal system that marginalized and vilified Jews. Max’s fear for his parents, his sense of guilt at his own relative comfort and safety in London, and his projected urge to “rescue” them, are explicitly framed within this real context of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany.

The British “Kindertransport” initiative was a direct response to this escalating persecution in the face of the world’s restrictive, often antisemitic, immigration policies. At the 1938 Evian Conference, for instance, 32 nations, including the United States, met to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis but ultimately failed to lift quotas, leaving countless families with no path to escape. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Evian Conference.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, 22 Sept. 2025.) Although the British authorities have since been criticized for taking only limited action, the Kindertransport is recognized as one of the very few official measures to rescue any Jewish people in the lead up to World War II: Great Britain made a rare exception to waive visa requirements for unaccompanied minors, but not for their parents. This led to the family separation that Max experiences, which the narrative makes explicit is a “trauma” for him and the other children he travels with. The decision to take only child refugees was largely political, as it was felt that widespread prejudice against immigrants and Jewish people in Britain at the time would make a large program of whole-family settlement unpopular. This discrimination is experienced by Max in the novel, especially in the school scenes, showing that Britain is an ambivalent place of refuge for him.

Although the Kindertransport children were only intended to be housed for the duration of the war, most children were unable to return to their homelands after 1945, largely due to the mass displacement and murder of Jewish families in the Nazi Genocide. The novel’s presentation of Max’s refugee status as a temporary measure and his personal determination to return are made more poignant by the historical fact that only an estimated 40% of the Kindertransport children were ever reunited with at least one of their parents (“Kindertransport Stories. Viennese Jews remember the Kindertransports.” Centropa.).