Benjamin Hirsch

Home is Where You Find It Benjamin Hirsch

Shortly after the devastating Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, author Benjamin Hirsch's mother sends him and his four older siblings on a Kindertransport to Paris from Frankfurt, Germany. After almost three years of hiding in France, they escape through Spain to Portugal where they board a ship and arrive in the United States on two separate convoys, eventually settling in Atlanta, Georgia. But Hirsch's parents and his younger siblings are not so fortunate-they perish in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is at its peak in the United States, and the children must learn to adapt to an America at war. Growing up in the American South as orphaned Jewish emigrants during the 1940s and early 1950s, Hirsch and his four brothers and sisters struggle-each in his or her own way-to hold on to their traditional Jewish values and practices. But in the aftermath of war, the children learn to thrive and excel in their new country. The prequel to Hirsch's first book, Hearing a Different Drummer, Home Is Where You Find It poignantly chronicles Hirsch's journey from the horrors of Nazism to a new life in America.