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The School that Escaped the Nazis
The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler | Deborah Cadbury
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The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harms 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 Hitlers hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England. As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Annas school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives. Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one womans refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.
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xicanti
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This book hit me HARD. It‘s a necessary reminder of the Third Reich‘s atrocities, a moving examination of how one woman fought to protect vulnerable students, and a thorough look at the psychological impact on the children who were so completely denigrated and disenfranchised. It‘s impossible to ignore the contemporary parallels, and all too easy to envision how actions like book bans contribute to a similar effect.

Read it. Please. 5 stars.

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Daisey
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I enjoyed this story of a Anna Essinger and the effort she put into protecting and educating her students. Early on she realized Hitler‘s rise to power would be a danger to her school, so she found a way to move it to England in 1933. Then she worked tirelessly to provide for students already in her care and to accept more as the war went on. Although not like we would today, she also supported the mental health needs of her students. ⬇️

Daisey The book also follows the stories of children that were in hiding or in concentration camps until coming to the school after liberation. I appreciated these parallel stories, but it did take a long time to see how they connected to the school.
Audio duration: 12 hours 28 minutes

#Nonfiction #WWII #audiobook #AudiobookSync
1y
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