During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

Blue is recalling a formative wartime displacement: as a Jewish child evacuated from London during the Blitz, he was placed with non-Jewish families and educated in settings where Christianity was the default cultural and religious language. The sentence points to how evacuation did more than provide physical safety—it immersed him in another faith’s domestic rituals, school prayers, and assumptions about belonging. In Blue’s later work, such experiences often underpin a reflective, dialogical approach to religion: Jewish identity shaped not only by inherited tradition but also by close, everyday contact with Christian belief and practice.