| Description |
xiv, 287 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references. |
| Contents |
Part I. Hidden in plain sight. 1. Walking my father's labyrinth -- 2. Bombs, bullets, and lies -- 3. Vichy, Lyon, and the flag of rags -- 4. No exit: Marseilles, fascist Spain -- 5. And the nightmare ocean crossing -- 6. Unraveling the chaos: a kid at the Dwight School -- Part II. The long road to Ritchie -- 6. Drafted -- 7. The Ritchie boy takes on the Pentagon -- Part III. Return from exile -- 8. Coup de grace: vetting war criminals from Mussolini's masses -- 9. It is your moral duty: DPs among the ruins in Austria and Germany -- 10. "I found your gold bally shoes" -- 11. The key to the wine cellar -- 12. Details are confusing, and freedom is just another word -- Appendix to the editors of the New Yorker: A letter from Austria. |
| Summary |
"Walter Wolff was the son of a Jewish merchant family that fled their German home when the Nazis came to power and took refuge in Brussels, Belgium. On the eve of the German invasion, in May 1940, the family began its second escape. Their sixteen-month odyssey took them through the chaos of battle in France and the dangers of living clandestinely as Jews in occupied territory, before they finally boarded the notorious freighter SS Navemar in Cadiz, Spain, to be among the last Jewish refugees admitted to the United States before Pearl Harbor. Within two years of his arrival in the States, Walter was ready to take the fight back to the Nazis as a soldier in the US Army. Trained for the Intelligence Corps at Camp Ritchie, he was sent first to Italy and then to Germany and Austria, where he interrogated POWs for potential prosecution as war criminals at Nuremberg. At the same time, he returned to the confiscated properties of his extended family, throwing out the occupiers. Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from her father's own cache of hundreds of wartime letters and photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
Wolff, Walter C.
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Jews -- Germany -- Biography.
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Jews, German -- United States -- Biography.
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Jewish refugees -- United States -- Biography.
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Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Germany -- Biography.
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| ISBN |
9781628723779 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
|
1628723777 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
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9781628723991 (ebook) |
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1628723998 (ebook) |
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