Small children romping in a park; smiling mothers watching their carefree offspring. The opening shots of Into the Arms of Strangers - the new documentary about Kindertransport, which had its royal premiere last week - look almost interchangeable with the handful of photographs I have of myself in pre-Hitler Vienna. At the time, it seemed so settled, so normal, so like the life of countless middle-class children growing up in comfortable circumstances in central Europe. But for the Jewish families among them, even if they saw themselves as wholly assimilated into Austrian society, it turned out to be illusory.

Two years later Austria had become a distant memory for me. A Kindertransport - a trainload of children whose parents had to be left behind - had brought me to safety but had muddled my sense of identity. I was in Britain, the country that had recognised me as a "refugee from Nazi oppression", but which nevertheless ranked even a child as an "enemy alien", a potential fifth column capable of undermining the war effort. My photographs of the war years show a sturdy child walking in the Lakeland, or in school uniform with my class at the Fairfield School, a private girls' school in Ambleside, Cumbria.

A stranger studying my two sets of photographs - before and after leaving Vienna - might think that, chameleon-like, I had changed persona smoothly and made the cultural transition without undue disturbance. In fact, 60 years on, I am still trying to work out how my life, my way of thinking, my relationships and attitudes, my character, have been affected by having been uprooted from my native environment. Part of me believes it has been a successful transplant and that Britishness has become a second skin. But part of me also thinks I am fundamentally rootless - "cosmopolitan" has a more positive ring to it - and in recent times yet another part of me wonders whether it is possible to be both anglicised and to recapture an affinity with Austria. All of me, however, is convinced that every individual has a different way of dealing with hurt, but that refugees have one factor in common: in some - often imperceptible - way, they remain damaged goods.

The Kindertransport added a unique phenomenon to refugeedom. Britain agreed in 1938 to take in unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany and Austria on condition that they would be found homes and not become a burden on the state. Their parents, unable to obtain visas for themselves and aware that the Nazis were closing in, preferred to send the children to safety, even if it meant breaking up the family. It was almost impossible to make the young understand that it was for their own good, and that they were not being rejected by their parents.

Into the Arms of Strangers gives a bird's eye view of the effect of Kindertransport on the lives of a handful of refugees. I can identify with some of these, first and foremost the fact that everybody stresses their quick absorption of the English language coupled with a rejection of their native tongue, German. This reflected the deep urge to meld into the social fabric of their new homeland and to be treated on an equal basis.

But the film also shames me into acknowledging the many gaps in my memory, a fact that has long troubled me. Unlike so many others, I can recall very little about my childhood in Vienna. Nor do I have in my mind's eye any clear impression of the parting from my mother on that March day in 1939, or of my train journey to London. The most vivid memory of that time is of my arrival in London, waiting at the reception centre at the railway to be picked up by two strangers who were to be my foster parents.

I have revisited the park in Vienna where I was taken to play. I have stood outside the block of flats where we lived, and looked at the junior school where I was a pupil. But I have failed to reconstruct any personal intimacy with those places or to identify the friends who are in the handful of photographs I still possess. To a limited extent, I was able to extricate some of the flavour of that early life from talks with my mother, who survived and lived in Britain until her death in 1972. But I know now that I never asked enough questions.

My parents had divorced before my fourth birthday and I barely knew my father or any of his family, who were orthodox Jews. My mother's family were non-practising Jews. Everyone was comfortably off, and my mother, though highly intelligent, had always lived in a world where women had neither the need nor the desire to earn a living. Fortunately she was a good cook. That proved invaluable in her quest for asylum abroad after Hitler's Anschluss of Austria. The search for escape became desperate in November 1938, after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis in Germany and Austria set about smashing synagogues and Jewish-owned properties.

While the US, the country of choice for many of Austria's Jews, resisted any change to its strict quotas, Britain was more generous. Provided an affidavit could be secured - a financial guarantee from a British person - visas were issued. Women could only take jobs as domestic servants.

British newspapers regularly carried "refugee" advertisements. I have a cutting of an ad placed by my mother seeking help for her mother - who was stranded in Prague and later died in the "model" concentration camp, Theresienstadt. "Guarantor urgently needed. Lady (61) must leave Czechoslovakia; danger: please help." Beneath it, another advertisement reads "LL.D. of Vienna, Jew, musical, versed in literature, bridge player, very adaptable, in distressful circumstances appeals urgently to kindhearted persons for guest permits for one year for self and wife (excellent cook, housekeeper and knitting modellist). Guarantee necessary is £200."

My mother was fortunate. A friend from Vienna who had arrived in Britain earlier found a family prepared to employ her as a housemaid. Three months after my Kindertransport, my mother arrived. My foster parents lived in the west London suburb of Brondesbury. The Infields were business people. They too were non-practising Jews and had been very welcoming. I knew no English; they had very little German, and I do not remember how we communicated in those early days. They sent me to a local school and within weeks I must have absorbed enough English to pass muster in end-of-term exams.

The Infields wanted me to be part of their family. They were less than enthused when my mother turned up. Her job was in Surrey; her employers were not prepared to have me live there. So I visited her and peppered her with postcards. It could have developed into a tug of war for my loyalties, as happened to many Kindertransport children whose real parents survived the war. Fortunately in my case, the separation was brief. My mother soon found herself a new job as a cook. Theo Chorley was a professor at the London School of Economics. He hankered after home-made apfelstrudel - my mother's forte. The Chorleys lived in a lovely house in Stanmore; but they also had a holiday home in the Lake District. They spent August 1939 there and told my mother that she could bring me.

I never lived with the Infields again, though they provided a little financial help and later put great, though unsuccessful, pressure on me to take a secretarial course and earn a living rather than go to university. The Chorleys were a cultivated family - they showed me British values and taught me how to fit in and understand the world in which I would have to make my life. Their three children became family to me.

Thanks to the Chorleys' intervention, Fairfield School gave me a non-fee-paying place. But they returned to London, and my mother had to find another job. This time it was a family with a house bordering on Lake Windermere. They tolerated me; but I was treated as the daughter of their domestic. I was expected to use the back door of the house and remain in the servants' quarters. I felt ashamed of my lowly status and only ever invited my closest schoolfriend to visit me at home - this at a time when I was so eager to integrate.

Throughout my school years, I was quite unable to acknowledge that I was Jewish and felt desperate if my mother or any of her refugee friends spoke German within earshot of strangers. I refused to speak the language until I developed a crush on one of my teachers, who insisted that I must not lose my mother tongue.

For a while, I found refuge in religion - or rather I enjoyed the ritual of church services in Grasmere, and clung to the Heaton-Coopers, a well-known Lakeland painter and his sculptress wife who had become fervent members of the Moral Re-armament movement. I idealised them and have no doubt that they steadied me at a time when I wanted to escape my refugeedom and the stigma of being the servant's daughter.

I am not sure if I was conscious of the extraordinary good fortune I had to be in the Lake District throughout the war, far away from the bombing. These were peaceful school years, where I learned to enjoy the English classics and became an ardent Girl Guide. One of my memories is of a guide camp in a sodden field on Beatrix Potter's Lakeland farm, and the thrill of meeting this fabled children's writer.

I was not yet 18 when I started at the London School of Economics and so was either too young or too insecure, or a bit of both, to make the most of student life. My mother had progressed from cooking to become a milliner and had moved to London. Lack of money meant that there was no alternative but to live with her. She clung to me and I clung to her for longer than was good for either of us. But at least she felt reasonably settled and had no desire to move on to the US.

It was a proud day in 1949 when we received news that our application for naturalisation had been granted, and that the former enemy aliens had been accepted as British citizens. After LSE my ambition was to work for the United Nations or some other international organisation. Ironically, I was thwarted by my new nationality: there were already too many Britons in the UN.

Eventually I arrived in journalism, first with a London-based weekly, West Africa, and then, from 1961, with the Guardian. But it was no accident that my professional interest has always focused on foreign policy, nor that travel has always been part of a routine I cannot abandon. I have a deep sense of belonging to Britain; but I still wonder whether anyone not born in this country is ever wholly accepted or integrated. This Kindertransport person needs to know that there are also wider horizons that remain to embrace her and be embraced.

• Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories from the Kindertransport is released next Friday.