The Children of La Hille: Eluding Nazi Capture During World War II - Paperback

by Walter W. Reed (Author), Figure Foundation (Other)

Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, frightened parents were forced to find refuge for their children, far from the escalating anti-Jewish violence. To that end, a courageous group of Belgian women organized a desperate and highly dangerous rescue mission to usher nearly 1,000 children out of Germany and Austria. Of these children, ninety-three were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night away from their families and into the relative safety of Vichy France. Ranging in age from five to sixteen years, the children along with their protectors spent a harsh winter in an abandoned barn with little food before eventually finding shelter in the isolated Château de la Hille in southern France. While several of the youngest children were safely routed to the United States, those who remained continued to be hunted by Nazi soldiers until finally smuggled illegally across the Swiss Alps to safe houses. Remarkably, all but eleven of the original ninety-three children survived the war due to the unrelenting efforts of their protectors and their own resilience.

Author Biography

Walter W. Reed (originally Werner Rindsberg) grew up in a Bavarian village near Würzburg and experienced Nazi persecution of Jews, including arrest as a fourteen-year-old on Kristallnacht. After immigrating to New York in 1941, he served as an American soldier from 1943 to 1946, and as an interrogator of German prisoners in General Patton's Third Army, starting after the liberation of Paris in 1944. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he pursued a forty-year career in public relations. Since 1998, he has been a frequent speaker about the Holocaust in the United States and in Europe.