Escape to Freedom - Survival, Dreams, Betrayals and Accomplishments
Book Details
Author(s)Henry Fribourg
PublisherHenry A. Fribourg
ISBN / ASINB00BC4QVI8
ISBN-13978B00BC4QVI8
Sales Rank1,114,833
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
ESCAPE TO FREEDOM – A Story of Survival, Dreams, Betrayals, and Accomplishments is the autobiographical memoir of a 12-year old French Jewish boy who with his parents, sister and baby brother, escaped from occupied Europe in January 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor. His mother had had premonitions of the coming Holocaust (Shoah) and needed to convince her husband to leave the Old World to give their children another chance at life, even when her parents opposed her departure.
He relates surviving three machine-gun strafings by a German fighter pilot, the walk of his soldier father most of the way across France, and the flight of his pregnant mother and sister with him to escape the German Panzers during the invasion of France in 1940. He describes the life in Vichy France and North Africa, and his expulsion from school; how it felt when the neutral ship on which he was sailing on the way to refuge in Cuba was stopped by a U-boat mid-way across the Atlantic; his learning Spanish and English the hard way; the murder of his grandparents – and the life his family created in the US after WW II.
He served in the US Army during the Korean War. Working his way through college, he had a 48-year career as a professor of crop ecology and as a successful pasture and beef cattle researcher. He married and had two children with his wife Claudia, who also had escaped Europe with her family as a very young child. He describes travelling widely to attend professional meetings and to help developing countries, while also visiting tourist venues, in Europe, the Americas and the Far East. Claudia accompanied him after the children were grown. When they were home, they spent several years building, on weekends, a log cabin vacation home on a lakeside hill with an unimpeded view of East Tennessee mountains.
Genealogical research allowed him to identify numerous members of his extended family who did not survive the Holocaust. His grandmother had taken refuge in 1942 in a small town in the mountains of central France, where she was arrested by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in spring 1943 and shipped in train Convoy 72 to Auschwitz. Sixty years later, the inhabitants of the town honored her memory, and that of other victims, in a moving ceremony of remembrance, with several survivors and descendants present.
This tale is a fascinating story of fortuitous luck and dogged determination to survive and create a fulfilling new life in America. Thoughout his book, he reminds his readers to not forget, but remember the events in Europe from 1933 through 1945.
He relates surviving three machine-gun strafings by a German fighter pilot, the walk of his soldier father most of the way across France, and the flight of his pregnant mother and sister with him to escape the German Panzers during the invasion of France in 1940. He describes the life in Vichy France and North Africa, and his expulsion from school; how it felt when the neutral ship on which he was sailing on the way to refuge in Cuba was stopped by a U-boat mid-way across the Atlantic; his learning Spanish and English the hard way; the murder of his grandparents – and the life his family created in the US after WW II.
He served in the US Army during the Korean War. Working his way through college, he had a 48-year career as a professor of crop ecology and as a successful pasture and beef cattle researcher. He married and had two children with his wife Claudia, who also had escaped Europe with her family as a very young child. He describes travelling widely to attend professional meetings and to help developing countries, while also visiting tourist venues, in Europe, the Americas and the Far East. Claudia accompanied him after the children were grown. When they were home, they spent several years building, on weekends, a log cabin vacation home on a lakeside hill with an unimpeded view of East Tennessee mountains.
Genealogical research allowed him to identify numerous members of his extended family who did not survive the Holocaust. His grandmother had taken refuge in 1942 in a small town in the mountains of central France, where she was arrested by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in spring 1943 and shipped in train Convoy 72 to Auschwitz. Sixty years later, the inhabitants of the town honored her memory, and that of other victims, in a moving ceremony of remembrance, with several survivors and descendants present.
This tale is a fascinating story of fortuitous luck and dogged determination to survive and create a fulfilling new life in America. Thoughout his book, he reminds his readers to not forget, but remember the events in Europe from 1933 through 1945.
