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Campus Authors: Refuge: Chronicle of a Flight from Hitler (Ariadne Press, 2002)
Childhoods are supposed to be full of playing ball, warm summer days at the pool and carefree attitudes all too soon lost to adulthood. But Egon Schwarz's childhood was anything but idyllic. Schwarz, professor emeritus of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, was forced from his homeland in Austria in 1938, when he was just 15, as the Nazis came to town. Refuge recounts his family's harrowing flight from persecution as they traveled through Bratislava, Prague and Paris, eventually winding up in Bolivia, of all places. "It was unusual because we were catapulted through these fascist waves from Central Europe to the Andes," Schwarz said, "and it's hard to imagine what Bolivia was like in the early 1930s. It was a very isolated country, and so I felt that I had to record that. "You want to share your vision, your experience, so that's why I began writing this book." Refuge was actually 30 years in the making because Schwarz often revised parts of it before finally getting it published for the first time in 1979 in Germany. But only recently was it translated into English. "It was dormant as far as the United States was considered," Schwarz said. "Then I gave a lecture in Vermont, and somebody told me I had to have the book translated, so I began working on it. "One day, Ariadne Press, who specializes in Austrian things, called me, and in that moment the manuscript was in the hands of an agent. But I withdrew it and gave it to Ariadne because they wanted it. And that's how it came out now, but it's actually an old book." Translators of the book were friends Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, Philip Boehm and Schwarz's daughter, Caroline Wellbery. The book tells of Schwarz coming to Bolivia, coming of age and eventually coming to the United States, where he became an internationally recognized scholar and professor of German. He taught at the University for 32 years before retiring in 1993. He is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century German literature and has made important contributions to the study of German literary figures such as poet Rainer Marie Rilke and novelist Herman Hesse. His book Verbannung (1964) was the first major study of the literary exiles who left Germany because of Hitler's regime, and his autobiography, No Time for Eichendorff (1979), details Schwarz's life in this hemisphere after he and his parents were forced to flee from Europe during World War II. Refuge, he says, was written for a couple of purposes. One was to inform today's generation of what the Nazi regime was really like; but another was to share an amazing story of perseverance and success. "Nobody knows what it was like if you haven't been involved," Schwarz said. "Whether something was two generations ago or Old Carthage, it's all the same to people today, and I do want the new generation to know about this. That's part of the reason I wrote this. "Basically I wrote it for myself; I had to get it off my chest. But once you've written something, you also want to share something. And if you've undergone extraordinary hardship -- and I think I can say that I did -- you want other people to know about it. That's a natural inclination." |
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