Walter's Welcome: The Intimate Story of a German-Jewish Family's Flight from the Nazis to Peru

By Eva Neisser Echenberg and Judy Sklar Rasminsky

“[A] captivating life account of an extended German-Jewish family that survived the Holocaust thanks to the determined efforts by one of its members” (Leo Spitzer, author of Hotel Bolivia).
 
Walter’s Welcome is the story of Walter Neisser and the more than fifty members of his family he helped to escape Nazi Germany. The story is told through the letters of the Neisser family, which have been meticulously translated and arranged by Walter’s niece, Eva, who also provides moving historical contextualization and commentary. After fleeing Germany, the Neissers resettled in Peru. However, their flight was neither easy nor seamless. Walter worked tirelessly to provide the resources and guidance necessary for the many members of the family to escape, but communications to Europe were frazzled and travel off the continent became increasingly impossible with each passing day, requiring extraordinary will and coordination to contact the correct officials and receive the necessary documentation. The family’s letters reveal the toll these efforts put on them and the challenges of waiting and surviving in a foreign land as they tried to hold together.
 
The story of Jewish escapees to Latin America has only recently begun to be widely explored. This memoir-in-letters explores the difficulties of daily life in this little explored context, as the Neisser family and many other escaped Jews adjusted to a new home and tried to build a new life in the shadow of the many horrific things happening back in the land they’d left behind.
 
“A fascinating and little-known account . . . I am still digesting the book’s riches—and sharing it with others.” —Walter Laqueur, historian and bestselling author of Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781510724778

Reviews for Walter's Welcome

[kaulsu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Walter’s Welcome" is a very nicely laid out ebook (also available in hardcover). Unlike so many ebooks, it does an excellent job with photos (and there are many!), and with a family tree.I doubt I am that different from many of my generation (born post-WWII): I’ve read many books about that war—beginning with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (Shirer) through political biographies of Churchill, F. D. Roosevelt, Truman, and so on. Biographies and memoirs have long been my favorite genre.And then I have read Jewish accounts of their survival in the camps—such as Victor Frankl’s "Man’s Search for Meaning" on to "A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Boy" by Thomas Buergenthal, the youngest survivor of the camps. (I met Buergenthal, who is now a sitting judge on the International Court of Human Rights.)This, however, is the first book I have ever read that tells of Jewish German repatriation; of the remuneration for lost (stolen?) property by the Nazis; or even of where German Jewish families emigrated to during the days when/if they were allowed to leave—and how they fared. This aspect of Walter’s Welcome was very interesting.Walter himself was a young man of chutzpah! Leaving Europe for South America, learning new trades, a new language….not only making new friends, but the type of friends that enabled him to become a success and therefore, enabled him to bring so many family members out of the camps and to a new world.I only lived in Peru for 2.5 years. There was much Echenberg wrote of that was unfamiliar to me, but not all. It was, therefore, also a trip down memory lane of sorts, for me. I learned of this book through an older alumnus of Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Fred Luss) who knew the author, Eva Neisser Echenberg ’58, the school I nearly graduated from in 1968 (my family returned to the U.S. in the winter of ’68).I read "Walter’s Welcome" through the Kindle app on my iPhone.