By Renee Ghert-Zand.
Extracts :
Hitler’s Jewish neighbor lived under Nazis’ noses, is now locked down in the UK
In ‘Hitler, My Neighbor,’ Edgar Feuchtwanger, now 95, recalled the day he went strolling as a boy with his nanny in Munich, and they passed the Nazi dictator… who tipped his hat…
“Edgar’s parents created a bubble to protect him and keep the beauty, the charm, the poetry as the world became smaller and smaller,” co-author Scali, 50, told The Times of Israel in a telephone interview from his home in Bordeaux, France.
Scali (whose paternal grandfather was a Sephardic Jew from Algeria who immigrated to Paris early in the 20th century and survived World War II with his family in hiding) thinks of the two apartment buildings on that Munich street in metaphorical terms. One was an edifice of brutality, and the other a palace of culture, art and intellectualism. It was as though they were in a standoff to see which would crumble first.
As we know, the brutality of Nazism won out initially. “But ultimately culture and sophistication won the war, because we have an old man [Feuchtwanger] having the last word,” Scali said.