I Have Seen the Mississippi: A child's escape from Europe to America 1938-1944
$61.95
A memoir of a boy whose childhood collides with history long before he stops believing in adventure.
When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, eleven-year-old Ivo Lederer and his Jewish family were forced to flee their beloved home city of Zagreb. Using false papers, they bribed their way onto a small fishing boat that crossed the Adriatic by night, only to be arrested by Italian fascists, escape again, and spend three years hiding in Italy under constant threat of discovery.
In 1944 they boarded the Henry Gibbins, the only ship of European refugees brought to the United States during the war outside the meager immigration quotas, and were taken to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, where they lived behind barbed wire until after the war ended. Written in the vivid, clear voice of the boy he was, I Have Seen the Mississipp i is a deeply humane memoir of a child's escape from Europe to America, and of the life that followed. Richly illustrated with color photographs from the family archive, the book offers both an intimate Holocaust-era survival story and an enduring testament to love, courage, and the small miracles that make survival possible.
When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, eleven-year-old Ivo Lederer and his Jewish family were forced to flee their beloved home city of Zagreb. Using false papers, they bribed their way onto a small fishing boat that crossed the Adriatic by night, only to be arrested by Italian fascists, escape again, and spend three years hiding in Italy under constant threat of discovery.
In 1944 they boarded the Henry Gibbins, the only ship of European refugees brought to the United States during the war outside the meager immigration quotas, and were taken to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, where they lived behind barbed wire until after the war ended. Written in the vivid, clear voice of the boy he was, I Have Seen the Mississipp i is a deeply humane memoir of a child's escape from Europe to America, and of the life that followed. Richly illustrated with color photographs from the family archive, the book offers both an intimate Holocaust-era survival story and an enduring testament to love, courage, and the small miracles that make survival possible.
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