Return To Erfurt

The narrative follows a family’s harrowing flight from Germany to Brussels, through the French camps of Gurs and Saint–Cyprien, to the Côte D’Azur. After their parents’ capture, Marianne and her brother found protection with Italian Jewish banker and philanthropist Angelo Donati, in Nice until September 1943, then in Italy. Their parents perished in deportation, and after the war, Donati—a key figure in the French underground Jewish rescue efforts—adopted the children and gave them his name. The book begins in 1999, as Marianne Spier-Donati, who had been living in Paris, contemplates returning to Erfurt at the mayor’s invitation.

Written in the first person from Marianne Spier-Donati’s perspective, this tour de force captures her story, beginning when she was five years old.