Customer Reviews:
 The world they thought they were living in May 7, 2008
Jeremy Walton (Oxford, UK)
I saw this title in the window of a remaindered bookshop a few days before going to Vienna with my family. I bought it without paying much attention to what it was about, but thinking it would make a nice accompaniment to the trip. It's an excellent, deeply moving story. Beginning with his great-grandfather, who was born when Metternich ruled Austria, Clare deftly charts the progress of his family, delineating their loves, quarrels, quirks and interests, up until the point where he and his parents had to flee Vienna following the Anschluss of 1938. This brings the narrative to a climax, with one of his mother's friends sadly asking "What world did we think we were living in?"
Clare describes Austria's struggle to remain independent from Germany, and the incredible speed at which anti-semitism rose to the surface following the country's capitulation (when, literally, a single day meant the difference between Jewish families being able to escape with most of their possessions and their having to remain, only to be stripped of their jobs and all that they owned). He finds that the abuse of the Jews was - at least initially - adopted much more enthusiastically in Austria than in Germany, although he also describes brave individuals in both countries who refused to go along with the tide. And his account of the end of his parents (who died in Auschwitz) and his uncle (who survived the war, but was irredeemably broken by it) is heartbreaking. Reading this book in Vienna, while walking through the streets mentioned in the narrative, made the events it describes even more vivid, even though it had the effect of turning the friendly, elegant city of the present day into a shadowy backdrop for this sinister tragedy.
A truly tragic story September 9, 2004
Darren Simons (Middlesex, United Kingdom)
This is one of the most moving book I have ever read on the subject of the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews that led up to it. Written in the first person, this book describes how an assimilated Jewish family (Klaar) saw the rise of Nazism firstly restrict and then completely destroy their family. Much of the book tells of the family history which is a key aspect when following his story. George Clare's description of ardent anti-semitism in Austria is particularly shocking but perhaps most significant of all is his very honest response (as an assimilated Jew) to what was happening around him. . At the time of the Anschluss the author was 17 years old - the book somewhat splits itself into two sections... his childhood and then adulthood coupled with anti-semitism. It is wonderfully written and I cannot recommend this book enough.
A truly tragic story August 30, 2004
Darren Simons (Middlesex, United Kingdom)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of the most moving book I have ever read on the subject of the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews that led up to it. Written in the first person, this book describes how an assimilated Jewish family (Klaar) saw the rise of Nazism firstly restrict and then completely destroy their family. Much of the book tells of the family history which is a key aspect when following his story. George Clare's description of ardent anti-semitism in Austria is particularly shocking but perhaps most significant of all is his very honest response (as an assimilated Jew) to what was happening around him. . At the time of the Anschluss the author was 17 years old - the book somewhat splits itself into two sections... his childhood and then adulthood coupled with anti-semitism. It is wonderfully written and I cannot recommend this book enough.
moving account of the destruction of a family and a country September 22, 2002
Dr. Sn Cottam (Preston, England)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a very necessary book for anyone who would understand the effects of Nazi racial politics on individuals.In clear and direct, but extremely moving prose, George Clare describes his family's services to Austria over the years (including in the Austro-Hungarian army) and his own early life in Vienna as a member of an assimilated Jewish family. But behind his idyllic early life is the growing menance of German and Austrian Nazism. The sheer ordinariness of a childhood and adolescence with his universal experiences makes a dramatic contrast with the extraordinary fate that overtakes the Klaars. George escapes to ultimately join the British Army but his parents and other members of his family are deported to be murdered in extermination camps in Poland. At the end of the book, George returns to France, many years later, to piece together his parents' last months of peace and their eventual terrible fate. On the way, Clare explains clearly the growth of Nazism in Austria and how Hitler was able to bully his native land into union with the German Reich. Superbly written, this is a heartbreaking account of how one family's fate encapsulates in microcosm the destruction of a way of life, a culture, a people and an entire country.
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