The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler

"After the end of the war, the school accepted survivors from Nazi-occupied Europe, and most thrived...Cadbury devotes a few chapters to their experiences, passages that emphasize the loathsomeness of Nazi behavior...An inspiring, well-researched life portrait of a spectacularly heroic teacher."

"Deborah Cadbury, drawing on her interviews with former pupils, tells this story with admirable plainness...It makes for a devastatingly affecting and moving book...Her chapters alternate between the nightmarish experiences of Jewish children in the Third Reich, and a kind of earthly paradise; this kindly run English institution with hot-water bottles, a vegetable garden, a gramophone club and Sunday violin concerts in the hall — the latter, as one pupil said, providing 'a unique and orderly situation as far removed from the chaos in Germany as it was possible to be'."

"BBC producer Cadbury delivers a stirring account of a German schoolteacher's efforts to build an oasis for children fleeing the Nazi advance across Europe...Anna Essinger, the headmistress of a progressive boarding school in Herrlingen, Germany, was quick to see the coming horrors of life under Hitler and arranged to bring 70 of her students, some as young as nine, with her to Kent, England, in 1933...Cadbury intersperses daily life at Bunce Court (which closed in 1948) with profiles of Anna's students, including Sidney Finkel, who saw his father die at Buchenwald; Leslie Brent, whose parents put him on the very first Kindertransport out of Berlin; and Sam Oliner, who lost his family in the liquidation of the Bobowa ghetto in Poland and was brought from a displaced persons camp in Germany to Bunce Court in 1946...Impressively researched and vividly told, this is a captivating portrait of courage and resilience in the face of unspeakable horror."