Fleeing the Nazis in the months before World War II, the Korman family scattered from a Polish refugee camp. The father sailed to Cuba on the ill-fated St. Louis; the mother left for the United States via Italy after sending her two sons on a Kindertransport. One of the sons was Gerd Korman, whose memoir traces his own path—from the family’s deportation from Hamburg to their reunited life in New York City.

Gerd Korman is a professor emeritus of American History at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His books include the prize-winning Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers and several works that established him as an early student of the Holocaust, including the anthology Hunter and Hunted.