The School That Escaped the Nazis Review: Field Trip to Freedom – The Wall Street Journal

Within months of Adolf Hitlers rise to power in 1933, the Jewish-German educator Anna Essinger devised an escape that would take her and her Jewish students and staff out of an increasingly repressive Germany. Under the pretense of a school trip, they divided into small groups, each traveling on its own schedule by train across the border and out of reach of the Nazis. Their destination was Bunce Court, a ramshackle 17th-century country estate in Kent, England, that would serve as their new school. There, over the course of the next 15 years, more than 900 traumatized and orphaned children would receive refuge and care and have a place to call home.

In The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler, the British author and BBC television producer Deborah Cadbury provides a persuasive portrait of Essinger (1879-1960) as a lesser-known heroine of the Holocaust and someone who deserves broader recognition.

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The School That Escaped the Nazis Review: Field Trip to Freedom - The Wall Street Journal