List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Prologue -- 1. Please Take My Children -- 2. Refuge in Belgium, 1938-1940 -- 3. Second Escape, May 14, 1940 -- 4. Life at Seyre, 1940 -- 5. The "Secours Suisse aux Enfants" and a Tough Winter -- 6. The Belgian Angels' Rescue Effort from across the Atlantic -- 7. Life at the Chateau de La Hille, 1941-1942 -- 8. Internment and Liberation -- 9. Hazardous Journeys across Well-Guarded Borders -- 10. The Noose Tightens and More Try to Escape -- 11. Hidden and Surviving in France until the End -- 12. New Faces at La Hille -- 13. Those Who Helped and Those Who Hindered -- 14. The Heroes of La Hille -- 15. After the Liberation -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix: List of Twelve Who Were Deported and Murdered -- Historical Timeline -- Notes -- Index
Summary:
Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, 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. Ninety-three were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night into the relative safety of Vichy France. Ranging in age from five to sixteen years, the children and 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. Remarkably, all but eleven of the original ninety-three children survived the war. As one of the La Hille children, Reed recalls with poignant detail traveling from lice-infested, abandoned convents to stately homes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, always scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Nazis.
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