The School That Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler

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. (June)