Escaping Hitler ─ A Jewish Boy's Quest for Freedom and His Future

Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gunter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened his family, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gunter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned.
The author gathered her information through interviews with Gunter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional foot-stepping’ journey in September 2013 the author visited Gunter’s birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gunter’s walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.

Phyllida Scrivens lives with her husband, Victor, on the River Yare in Norwich, England, with swans, geese, and ducks for neighbors. Since ten years old she has loved to write. Her successes include articles for magazines, short stories, monologues and one-act plays. At the age of sixty she fulfilled a long-term ambition when awarded a masters in biography and creative nonfiction from the University of East Anglia. But it was a weekly biographical interview feature, Meeting People, published during the nineties that unwittingly prepared her for this debut full-length biography.