I Am a Refugee (Paperback)

This memoir portrays the dreadful experiences of Camillo Adler and his family as Austrian refugees in France following the outbreak of WWII. Despite his suffering in internment camps, Adler feels bound by honor and duty to fight against the brutal Nazi regime. He enlists into the French Foreign Legion, enduring its rigors of harsh basic training in Algeria and Morocco and eventually returns home after France's swift surrender to Germany in the summer of 1940. To escape the Holocaust during the gruesome German occupation, the family with its two small children flees in a precarious journey to Switzerland. The book vividly depicts life in the Swiss refugee camps and the family's eventual unification. Long after Camillo Adler's death in 1985, his son Michel, the translator, discovered Camillo Adler's original German manuscripts, written in 1944. Beyond an account of events, his story is an intimate window into the conditions of the period, the ramifications of human action and inaction and into the thought-world of the many Jewish refugees during that tumultuous time.