Book description
A recently discovered account of an Austrian Jewish writer's flight, persecution, and clandestine life in wartime France.
As arts editor for one of Vienna's principal newspapers, Moriz Scheyer knew many of the city's foremost artists, and was an important literary journalist. With the advent of the Nazis he was forced…
Why read it?
1 author picked Asylum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I came across this remarkable contemporary memoir, written by a Jewish journalist between 1943 and 1945 when researching a specific village in the Dordogne. Scheyer's family happened to have been hidden first in the village and then in a local convent.
This was only part of the extraordinary experiences of the writer during the Second World War when he was forced to flee Vienna and ended up in rural France, having been incarcerated twice. I do not think any other writer could recount their experiences in such simple yet powerful prose. It is one of only a handful of memoirs…
From Robert's list on extraordinary people in Nazi-occupied France.
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