The School that Escaped the Nazis

April 4, 2022
BBC producer Cadbury (Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking) 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. With help from local politicians and Quaker and Jewish groups, Anna transformed an old manor house called Bunce Court into a new school and eventually began accepting “waves of increasingly traumatised children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and then Poland.” 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. These and other youths ultimately found healing at Bunce Court, where students built greenhouses, grew their own food, and maintained the buildings and grounds. Impressively researched and vividly told, this is a captivating portrait of courage and resilience in the face of unspeakable horror.

May 1, 2022
A Holocaust-era biography about a courageous educator who, like many, found it impossible to see "how humanity could progress in the kind of society Hitler was making." Though Anna Essinger (1879-1960) is largely forgotten, BBC producer Cadbury's compelling, often disturbing narrative will convince readers of her historical significance. Traveling to the U.S. at age 20, Essinger obtained a degree in education and inspiration from Quaker humanitarian values. Returning to impoverished post-World War I Germany, she worked in famine relief and visited schools, which employed almost militarily strict methods. In 1926, Essinger opened a progressive school where children and teachers lived together, sharing responsibility for education as well as discipline. It succeeded and received praise from local educational authorities. Most of the students were Jewish (as was Essinger). When Hitler took power in 1933, most German Jews temporized, but the prescient Essinger immediately determined to move her school to Britain. Remarkably, she was able to bring 70 children to Bunce Court, an impressive if run-down country manor. After much labor from staff and students, the school took off, as Essinger was able to integrate the school "into the British educational system while retaining its essential uniqueness." Soon, desperate Jewish families inside Germany were pleading with Essinger to accept their children. Although always near bankruptcy, she kept the school open against overwhelming odds. In addition to lauding Essinger's dedication, Cadbury emphasizes the school's superior education. Students delivered lectures and performed plays, concerts, and operas for the community. 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. Elderly and infirm, Essinger closed the school in 1948, but graduates continued to relish their experience and hold reunions. Mused one former student, "I can never understand why more schools are not run on a similar basis." An inspiring, well-researched life portrait of a spectacularly heroic teacher.

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May 1, 2022
Resistance to the Nazis caused many individuals to flee Germany and its conquered territories, but rarely did institutions as a whole abandon Nazi lands. In 1933, to escape the darkness descending over Europe, one teacher transported her entire boarding school from south Germany to Britain's Kent countryside. Anna Essinger had read Mein Kampf and took seriously the dangers to Germany's Jews it implied. As headmistress of Landschulheim Herrlingen, Essinger committed herself and her Jewish students to progressive education and humanistic values. Ferrying her charges out of Germany proved less difficult than anticipated, but she faced troubles from initially skeptical British educational inspectors. The school's neighbors were equally suspicious for a short time, until they realized the depth of the Nazi threat to Britain. As the years progressed, more and more students from Nazi-controlled lands appeared on the school's doorsteps. Cadbury (Princes at War, 2015) tells the story of this remarkable school and its courageous leader as she details the lives of many of the children who made their way out of horror to a safe haven.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2022

By now, almost everyone has heard the Talmudic teaching "whoever saves one life saves the world entire," famously repeated in the movie Schindler's List. During the grim years of World War II, stories such as Oskar Schindler's are the small bright lights in a world of death and destruction. The story of Anna Essinger and her school, relocated from Germany to England, saved the lives of dozens of Jewish children fortunate enough to have been sent there by their parents. Her dedication, resourcefulness, and deep sense of morality kept the institution she founded going through the very worst of times. In Cadbury's book, readers come to know in a very real way a woman whose dedication was not merely to educating but healing young lives. She seemed to intuit in the 1930s and '40s how to care for children and young people we would now say suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is a stunning read. VERDICT Cadbury's captivating book enhances an already voluminous body of WWII writing and is a testament to the best humanity has to offer. It has the potential to be a book club favorite.--Brett Rohlwing

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