Articles liés à Memories and Reflections: A Refugee's Story

Memories and Reflections: A Refugee's Story - Couverture souple

Bown-Jacobowitz, Edith; Whitmarsh, Jerry

 
9781495336621: Memories and Reflections: A Refugee's Story

Synopsis

Edith Bown-Jacobowitz was born in Berlin in 1924 to a respectable middle-class Jewish family. This is her story, in her own poignant and moving words. It covers her life from her early childhood, through steadily increasing tensions and anti-semitism, until the catastrophe of kristallnacht and the ensuing Jewish pogrom. Aged 15, she was put on a Kindertransport train with a small suitcase and her young brother, and sent to Britain two months before the Second World War began. She never saw her parents or any other close member of her family again. Being deposited at Liverpool Street station with her 11 year old brother, almost unable to speak English, was a shattering experience for 15 year old Edith to cope with. The two were sent on to Liverpool and then across the Irish Sea to Belfast, where the Jewish community took them in and looked after them. The book narrative ends after Edith, now a qualified nurse marries Len Bown (his autobiography is also available) in 1951. However it also includes 9 appendices covering two emotional return visits to Berlin after the war, two Kindertransport reunions in London, a trip to Jerusalem, an interview with the BBC, and other interesting material. This book is a little unconventional in style, including as it does diary entries, letters as well as the narrative and the appendices, but it never fails to be readable, interesting and at times poignant and emotional. You may well shed a tear from time to time. If you want to know how Jews were treated in pre-war and wartime Germany, and how the fortunate few escapees fared in Britain, this book is a must-read. It is not just a gripping personal memoir but an important historical document.

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À propos de l'auteur

Edith Bown-Jacobowitz was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in the 1920s. Aged 15 she was put on a train to England with her 11 year old brother, two months before the second world war broke out. Edith has survived a series of shattering events in her life, has coped with and surmounted them all, and now lives quietly in retirement in South-East England.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.