Download Last train to freedom: A story of a Holocaust survivor's travels to America ePub

This book's author, a child when Hitler came to power, describes the series of moves by which his German-Jewish family escaped -- only just -- the Holocaust. Having moved to France in 1933, his father was interned in French concentration camps at the outbreak of war, because officially he was an enemy alien. When the Germans were at the outskirts of Paris in June 1940, the author and his mother and sisters managed to board the very last train leaving Paris for the south -- the actual train immortalized in fiction in the movie "Casablanca." They lived at Vichy, where the Under the conditions of the Armistice, the French agreed to turn over German refugees to the Nazis, thus leaving thousands of Jews trapped in the French concentration camps. With the help of a relative already in the U.S., the author's family was able to leave France in September 1941 -- almost the last boat available to refugees -- for Cuba. There the refugees arrived to a Rosh Hashanah feast provided by the local Jewish community. The author, then in his early teens, went to work as a diamond polisher and cutter in the shops of one of the diamond merchants evacuated from Holland and Belgium as those countries fell. His income kept the family fed through the war, and in 1946, they came to the U.S., where the author became a highly successful businessman.
The book provides valuable insight into the thinking of a well-educated, assimilated German-Jewish family as it tries to cope with a series of events that are turning its world upside down: the coming of the Nazis to Germany, the unexpected sudden defeat of France, and the closing of the net around the refugees from Germany. The difficulties of finding a place of haven are also illuminated.
Prticularly interesting and valuable is the way in which the book shows how psychologically difficult it was for many refugees to make the break from Europe. This is exemplified by the author's father, who, even on the boat carrying the family to the New World, was lamenting, "I only wish we were going the other way." His desire, unbelievable as it sounds today, was to return to German-occupied Paris. (If his wishes had prevailed, the whole family would have died in the gas chambers, as did several of his siblings.)
This book is a valuable addition to Holocaust literature, because it throws light on an aspect that it insufficiently written about: the practical and psychological difficulties of those trying to escape the Nazis in the days when no one could yet know, and few could imagine, the full dimensions of the horrors to come. How people viewed the magnitude of the danger seems in part a reflection of their own makeup: pessimistic vs. optimistic, realistic vs. tending toward denial.
The book is also a warm and often startlingly candid portrait of a family that is at the same time ordinary and extraordinary: quirky people, adjusting in very different ways to new circumstances. The stories it tells would be the material of fiction if it were not apparent that it is absolutely factual. Elegantly put together, with many photographs, the book is a pleasure to read and own.

Robert Ronald/Rosenthal has written in Last Train to Freedom with great clarity of his family's escape from Hitler and the catastrophe that was the Holocaust. Now a successful businessman who lives in Northern California with a family he loves deeply, Ronald has found the courage to relive and recount the heartbreak of losing his childhood home and his father to prison. He clearly conveys the terror of being a child always "on the run" with the enemy just behind. To his credit he manages to anchor his individual tale firmly in the historical setting and to give it a higher meaning as a parable of innocence and betrayal. He came of age in a world gone mad and is that remarkable man who can tell his story with courage and insight.