Eithne Nightingale's Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain is an important and welcome book. Its sixteen substantive chapters feature the testimony of child migrants to Britain, beginning in 1938, with Blanca Stern and Necha Gluck on the widely commemorated Kindertransport, and ending in 2022 with the hopes and fears of Mariia, fleeing the invasion of Ukraine, separated from her father and friends, unable to practice the dancing that was her passion and uncertain for the future. Their stories are always moving, often heartbreaking, and Nightingale, rightly, gives space to the testimonies. They are stories that reach across the globe, traversing the ghosts of the British Empire, and witnesses to violence, trauma, and separation, but also to hope, perseverance, and solidarity. Aside from occasional and helpful contextual observations or explanations, the more analytical sections of the book are contained in introductory and concluding chapters that explain methodological choices, introduce key themes, and evidence the recent assault on human rights contained in the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) and the Illegal Migration Act (2023). The result is a powerful piece of activist scholarship, committed and compassionate, that quietly but insistently invites the reader to action and to mobilize against the hate directed toward immigrants.

Both methodology and theory inform the invitation to action. Despite the subtitle, the book is not, at least to this reader, a conventional oral history. It does not attempt to collate, catalog, or preserve memories for an imagined future historian. Instead, Nightingale engages in a form of historical coproduction, sensitive to the needs and experiences of the people she works with, walking their streets, visiting their homes and places of work, and developing relationships of trust that can be mutually empowering. The testimony produced from these practices demonstrates these stories are histories with afterlives, pasts that are firmly in the present, and that continue to reverberate for individuals and families.

They are also testimonies that invite witnesses. Nightingale draws extensively on trauma theory in arguing for the significance of engaged and empathetic listening that can help to restore humanity and identity (6). Witnessing is also configured as a pedagogical and political act. Putting testimony into circulation, both in these narratives and in the filmmaking and exhibitions associated with them, is designed to provide stories that counter the demonization of migrants and refugees. They are narratives that “highlight agency, individuality and [they] humanize lives” (10). Nightingale has performed a valuable task in co-producing and circulating them.

Yet Nightingale also knows that narratives need politics if they are to sustain meaningful change. Empathy, compassion, and self-reflexivity may be helpful but only insofar as they enable readers and viewers to recognize their implication in the ongoing violence and injustice visited on migrants and refugees. Britain's colonial legacies, its plundering of wealth, construction of boundaries and borders, and its administrative bureaucracies of deciding who is in and who is out, live on. It is, in Berber Bevernage's terms (History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence. Time and Justice [2012]), an “irrevocable past” that still demands our recognition, calls us to see and witness, and invites new forms of solidarity to understand and dismantle the violence that destroys lives.