Out of Nazi Germany and Trying to Find my Way - Irene Matthews

 2020 Reading Challenge

August 28, 2020

Book 62 - Out of Nazi Germany and Trying to Find my Way
Irene Matthews

I bought this book off of an online bookstore after getting a recommendation from a Norwegian contact. The book is written by Irene (nee Hagen) Matthews who was born in 1927 in Berlin, Germany. It is a short book (109 pages) and tells the tale of her childhood in Berlin. Her grandfather owned a bank and was Jewish. Slowly, over the course of the book, the "normal" activities of daily life are curtailed for the Jews by Nazi regulations. Eventually Irene's parents send her out of Germany to England, to a Jewish refugee school. Her parents follow a year or two later but Irene spends her youth in boarding schools as her parents don't have space in their tiny apartment during the school breaks. It is quite a touching book and a very interesting point of view, that of a child, growing up in Nazi Germany. My own mother was born in the early 1930s in Berlin, so the stories that she told me are quite similar to Irene's... with the exception of the Jewish point of view. Similar childhoods but so very different as well.