This paper focuses on the psychological experience of children who were separated from their parents because they sent them to England to save their lives from the impending Holocaust in continental Europe. The parents of these children expressed their love and concern to ensure their offspring's survival through the self-sacrificial act of parting with them. What they could not prevent were the traumatic effects of this separation and its sequellae. Drawing on clinical material of former Kindertransportees as adults from her private practice and group work with a colleague, Ruth Barnett offers an understanding of the psychic journey that was imposed on these children by the deliberately inflicted atrocities to which their families and communities were subjected in the name of genocide and for the purpose of ‘ethnic cleansing’. She hopes this may be of some value to therapists working with the victims of similar attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ such as perpetrated in Rwanda and Bosnia.