Overview

In a compelling approach to storytelling, When Europe Was a Prison Camp weaves together two accounts of a family's eventual escape from Occupied Europe. One, a memoir written by the father in 1941; the other, begun by the son in the 1980s, fills in the story of himself and his mother, supplemented by historical research. The result is both personal and provocative, involving as it does issues of history and memory, fiction and ""truth,"" courage and resignation. This is not a ""Holocaust memoir."" The Schrags were Jews, and Otto was interned, under execrable conditions, in southern France. But Otto, with the help of a heroic wife, escaped the camp before the start of massive transfers of prisoners ""to the East,"" and Peter and his mother escaped from Belgium before the Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Yet, the danger and suffering, the comradeship and betrayal, the naive hopes and cynical despair of those in prison and those in peril are everywhere in evidence.

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9780253017697

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Reviews

Powerfully written. A book that deals with paradoxes, dilemmas, and insolvables... in an unusual, highly affecting narrative of the World War II experience of Jews but also of non-Jews outside the Nazi concentration and death camps. Emily Miller Budick, author of The Subject of Holocaust Fiction

When Europe Was a Prison Camp is a brilliant, eloquent, and compelling intergenerational memoir about the escape from Belgium of the Schrags, an assimilated bourgeois German family leading the good life, who overnight became Jews (again) when the shooting started in WWII. Civic order was fractured as these heroes without courage endured the grossest inhumanities. A timely reminder that life for Jews in the Diaspora is inevitably contingent and perilous. Mark G. Yudof, President Emeritus, University of California</p>

Author Information

Peter Schrag is a lifelong journalist and author of Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (a New York Times Notable Book), and Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America, among other books. A former executive editor of Saturday Review and editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, he has written for The Atlantic, Harper's, the Nation, New Republic, the New York Times, and other major publications. Otto Schrag (1902-1971) was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Germany. Among the last Jews to get a PhD from Heidelberg before the war, he entered his grandfather's beer malt-processing business. In 1935, he fled Germany, eventually settling with his family in Brussels. With the start of the German invasion, the Belgians arrested him as an enemy alien, thus beginning the events narrated here. In New York in the 1940s, he wrote three well-regarded novels. He returned to Germany in 1950 and successfully rebuilt the business the Nazis had seized. There he wrote another novel and translated From Here to Eternity into German.

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