The Exit Visa: A Family's Flight from Nazi Europe

Description

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.

Sheila Rosenberg was a teacher of English Literature and published in the area of Victorian Studies. She then moved into teaching, developing and publishing in English as a second language and in 2011 received an OBE for her contribution to ESOL teaching.

This is a well-researched and often heartrending book, illustrated with poignant poetry. It draws from Hilda's own recollections and extensive investigations as well as on historical research by others. It is strong in human interest and painstakingly put together with helpful headings to make reading easier. * AJR Journal * Thoughtfully illustrated by precious family photographs ... Hilda and her family have clearly undertaken a great deal of meticulous research ... [This book] should help anyone else researching a typical European Jewish family in terms of where they might need to undertake research to locate vital fragments of information about what happened to their relatives. * Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine * Contains a terrific amount of information and is thoroughly researched ... Informative and touching, and a worthy contribution to Kindertransport and Holocaust literature ... A beautiful book, with many interesting illustrations; a book that raises interesting questions about memoir as a literary form. * Voices Newspaper * Represents a necessary form of intervention that appeals to the responsibility not of future but of current historians and journalists. * Jewish Historical Studies * The Exit Visa is remarkable. It encapsulates the bravery, fear and ultimately impossible choices of Jewish Refugees from Nazism. Through painstaking research, the journeys of the Schiff family are re-created. it is a study especially of mother and daughter: Toni, who comes agonisingly close to safety on the French-Swiss border, but is turned away and deported to her murder at Auschwitz, and Hilda who comes to England on the Kindertransport. This multi-layered account, curated deftly by Sheila Rosenberg, melds history, memory and reflection, most powerfully through Hilda Schiff's poetry of loss and displacement. It raises troubling questions of what happens when human beings are labelled 'illegal' as relevant to the migrant crisis today as it is to understanding the Jewish experience of persecution during the Holocaust. * Professor Tony Kushner, University of Southampton * The Exit Visa tells how the horrors of the Nazis overwhelmed a typical Jewish family - a unique story of survival by some and the capture of one woman on the Swiss German border within sight of her horrified husband. * Lord Alf Dubs, Arrived in the UK in 1939 on a Kindertransport * A moving and often unsettling investigation of alienation and reunification under and after the Nazi regime. Rosenberg has crafted a skillfully embroidered narrative of the Schiff children, Hilda and Gitti, their experiences as Kindertransportee children in England, and their efforts to unravel the mystery of their mother, Toni, who was separated from her husband at the Franco-Swiss border in September 1942. The story roves across cities, memories and conversations, while historians and archives reveal the painful conclusion of Toni's journey in Nazi Europe. The Exit Visa is a vital memoir of longing and loss. * Dr Simone Gigliotti, Senior Lecturer/Reader in Holocaust Studies, Royal Holloway University of London *