Description
Rosenberg, a teacher of English literature and English as a second language, relates the story of the wartime journey of Toni Schiff, a Jewish woman who traveled across Europe to meet her husband Moses on the French-Swiss border, who had been living in Switzerland since he fled Vienna from the Nazis in 1938. She draws on the research of Schiff's daughter Hilda, detailing her story along with Moses and Toni's story, including the organization of her mother's escape to Palestine, putting her daughters on a Kindertransport to the UK, and journeying across Europe to seek safety, only to be turned away and deported at the French-Swiss border and murdered at Auschwitz. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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6th September, 1942: a middle-aged Jewish refugee stands on the Swiss side of the Franco-Swiss border above Geneva. He has been living in Switzerland since he fled Vienna in November 1938, as the Nazi persecution of the city's Jewish population intensified. He is now waiting for the arrival of the wife he has not seen for nearly four years. Against all odds he has managed to get an entry permit for her to join him in Switzerland. She appears on the French side. They see each other. Call out. She begins to cross the few yards of no-mans-land that separate them. An official calls her back. She hesitates, turns, goes back - and is lost forever. This book tells the story of the wartime journey of Toni Schiff, as she ventured across Europe to the this fateful near-meeting at the Franco-Swiss border – and what happened next. Based on the extensive research of her daughter, Kindertransportee Hilda Schiff, and told by Sheila Rosenberg, who shared much of the later research and many of the research journeys, this book sheds light on the lives of one family – caught up in, and ultimately separated by, the tragic and tumultuous events of World War II.
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