The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler

by Deborah Cadbury

Book Overview

Named one of Book Riot's BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF 2022

The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm's way.

In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler's hate-fueled ideologies...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1541751191
• ISBN13: 9781541751194
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The title is misleading

First. The bad thing about the title being misleading is that we don’t read the actual steps and contrivances and difficulties in getting an entire school for Jewish children out of Nazi Germany. On one page Tante Anna decides to move them. On the next page, they’ve moved. So the book really isn’t about the process But the second reason the title is misleading is that this book pulls no punches. There is no delicate rendering of the difficulties Jewish people experienced in Germany and occupied areas. I have read many books on the Holocaust, the Nuremberg laws, the Final solution and concentration camps, etc. And it was this book that caused my heart to tremble and my mind to be overwhelmed with sadness and horror. This book is the one book that tops all I’ve read that forces you to face every unimaginable evil that debased human beings can construct. I was floored. I found myself wondering if I could stand up to a Nazi, if I could hide a Jewish refugee, if I could stand for my own children to be in those predicaments and traps. It’s visceral writing. And I must include the connection Ms. Cadbury builds for readers with every single individual chronicled in the book’s pages. These precious people swing wide the door for you to enter into all their ordeals, emotions, struggles, anguish. You want to do anything to help them back from a pit you have no zone for. So, not the book experience I was expecting, but one that I am so appreciative to have privy to. It will be a book in which its details will no fade over time!