Leo Bretholz will talk about his memoir, written in 1998, which chronicles his years on the run to escape Nazi persecution in wartime Europe.

Young Leo Bretholz fled his native city of Vienna in October 1938 after Nazi Germany entered Austria and annexed it.  In the ensuing seven years, he was constantly on the run, crisscrossing war-torn Europe. He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety. He swam a river to Luxembourg on a chilly night end of October, and eventually wound up in Belgium, where he later was arrested as an "enemy Alien," and sent (with several hundred others) to an internment camp in Southern France.  He escaped from that camp three months later. In 1942 he escaped with a friend from a deportation train bound for Auschwitz - originating from the infamous camp of Drancy, near Paris.

In 1999 the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington chose the book to be used for their fund raising events. A number of school districts in the US have acquired "Leap Into Darkness" as a teaching tool for European history/Holocaust studies. In 2005 the book was translated into the German language by an Austrian publisher under the title "Flucht in die Dunkelheit."

November 29  |  7:30 pm  |  Embassy of Austria
Admission free. RSVP required: 202-895-6776 or rsvp@austria.org
Wine and cheese reception to follow.