The School That Escaped the Nazis by Deborah Cadbury

The School That Escaped the Nazis

The School That Escaped the Nazis by Deborah Cadbury wasn’t quite what I expected it to be from the title, as although it is about a school which was moved from Germany in 1933 to England by a very far-seeing and dynamic woman called Anna Essinger (Tante Anna) there’s also an awful lot of quite harrowing history from the early 1930s in Germany. Anna’s school in Germany had been a liberal one and as she herself was Jewish she saw the dangers for her pupils as the Nazis took power, and she began to get as many children over to Britain as she could, it wasn’t easy. The school which she set up in Kent was in dilapidated buildings and by the time she had got it into shape the war had begun and the buildings were requisitioned by the government for the army so she had to start all over again in a different location.

She did manage to save a lot of children over the years, but there were so many that couldn’t be saved, and the story of the school is interspersed with what was going on in Germany over this time and what was happening to the families of some of the children. Just when I thought I knew all of the ghastly things that the Nazis got up to I discovered that I didn’t.

With what’s going on in Ukraine now, I found it quite depressing, although it’s a well written book . However, it is important that the story has been told – ‘lest we forget.’

I had thought that the book might have been more like the wonderful BBC programme The Windermere Children which is the true story of young Jewish refugees who had been liberated from concentration camps and flown to a very different kind of camp in the Lake District of northern England. If you haven’t seen it it’s well worth watching if you can.

Thanks to NetGalley for sending me a digital copy for review.