When Time Ran Out: Coming of Age in the Third Reich

The author describes his experiences growing up in Nazi Germany and recounts how his parents sent him to safety in the Netherlands

This unpretentious Holocaust memoir has a powerful impact. Based on diaries kept by sculptor Zeller as a boy, it tells of a young German Jew's coming-of-age in a world of increasing anti-Semitism, culminating in Kristallnacht in 1938. Written without rancor--rather, with a sense of astonishment--the book offers a devastating picture of what life was like for the Jewish middle-class as persecution intensified from verbal assaults and graffiti to beatings and deportations. Zeller and his sister escaped to Holland, virtually the only country accepting refugees at the time, and from there to England. Their parents perished in the camps. Photos not seen by PW. Paperback rights to Berkley.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Today Zeller is a sculptor and writer; 50 years ago, just before the outbreak of World War II, he was an 11-year-old Berliner, eager for life. When he saw how determined the Nazis were to make life difficult for the Jews, and then even began to round them up for purposes he could not know, he and two cousins smuggled themselves into Holland. Because Zeller liked to write and draw, he kept a diary of his escape and escapades which now form the basis for this book. The book is very well written and recounts those cruel years as a backdrop to the story of boyhood. The book ends all too soon with Zeller's departure to a British children's camp, but there is promise of a sequel, the English years in the 1940s. Watch for it.
- Gerda Haas, Holocaust Human Rights Ctr. of Maine, Lewiston
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.