
The School That Escaped the Nazis
- Author Deborah Cadbury
- Narrator Julie Teal
- Publisher John Murray Press
- Run Time 12 hours and 29 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography: historical, political and military, History, Second World War.
Listen to a sample
What to expect
The extraordinary true story of progressive schoolteacher, Anna Essinger, the woman who defied Hitler, smuggling her school and its pupils from Nazi Germany to the safety of England.
‘All the violence I had experienced before felt like a bad dream. It was a paradise. I think most of the children felt it was a paradise.’
In 1933, as Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger hatched a daring and courageous plan: to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fuelled ideologies posed to her pupils. She knew that to protect them she had to get her pupils to the safety of England.
But the safe haven that Anna struggled to create in a rundown manor house in Kent would test her to the limit. As the news from Europe continued to darken, Anna rescued successive waves of fleeing children and, when war broke out, she and her pupils faced a second exodus. One by one countries fell to the Nazis and before long unspeakable rumours began to circulate. Red Cross messages stopped and parents in occupied Europe vanished. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope; the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives, showing them that, despite everything, there was still a world worth fighting for.
Featuring moving first-hand testimony, and drawn from letters, diaries and present-day interviews, The School That Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique child’s-eye perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her beliefs in a better, more equitable world to be overtaken by the evil that surrounded her.
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Critics Review
**PRAISE FOR DEBORAH CADBURY**
A gripping story beautifully told
Jane Ridley on QUEEN VICTORIA'S MATCHMAKINGFrom the pen of a writer of skill and style, this surprising narrative leaves you wanting more
The Times, on QUEEN VICTORIA'S MATCHMAKINGIrresistible. This is history brought bang up to date in the hands of a master storyteller
Juliet Nicolson on CHOCOLATE WARSEngaging and scholarly, confident and compassionate
Daily Telegraph on CHOCOLATE WARSAn affecting human story, fluent and highly readable
Hilary Mantel on THE LOST KING OF FRANCE
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