Walter's Welcome: The Intimate Story of a German-Jewish Family's Flight from the Nazis to Peru

by Eva Neisser Echenberg, Judy Sklar Rasminsky (Contributor)

**Number 47 on Book Authority's 94 Best Nazi Germany Books of All Time!**Walter’s Welcome is the story of Walter Neisser and the more than fifty members of his family he helped to escape Nazi Germany. The story is told through the letters of the Neisser family, which have been meticulously translated and arranged by Walter’s niece, Eva, who also provides moving historical contextualization and commentary. After fleeing Germany, the Neissers resettled in Peru. However, their flight was neither easy nor seamless. Walter worked tirelessly to provide the resources and guidance necessary for the many members of the family to escape, but communications to Europe were frazzled and travel off the continent became increasingly impossible with each passing day, requiring extraordinary will and coordination to contact the correct officials and receive the necessary documentation. The family’s letters reveal the toll these efforts put on them and the challenges of waiting and surviving in a foreign land as they tried to hold together. The story of Jewish escapees to Latin America has only recently begun to be widely explored. This memoir-in-letters explores the difficulties of daily life in this little explored context, as the Neisser family and many other escaped Jews adjusted to a new home and tried to build a new life in the shadow of the many horrific things happening back in the land they’d left behind.

Genres: World War II

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 2, 2018

About the author

Born in Lima, educated in the USA, I have lived in Canada for most of my adult life.

A global citizen, both my writing and my personal life has been dedicated to acceptance of the "Other". As an author of eight Spanish cultural workbooks, I have promoted diversity and cultural literacy in the Spanish language classroom. Written in response to the grammar based language teaching that was standard practice in my profession, I developed interdisciplinary units based on content which are now the norm in the field.

My own personal history is the subject of my latest work, Walter's Welcome. Through letters and pictures, it tells the story of my family's flight from Germany and life in Peru.

Reviews

[Angela M · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

I started reading this book on Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, but it’s not a story of those who perished during that horrific time but a story of survivors, a story of a man with the means to move 50 members of his family and extended family from Nazi Germany to Peru. Eva Neisser Echenberg has written a tribute to her uncle Walter Neisser, a man not just with the resources to do this but with guts and persistence and heart and the foresight to know what might happen in Germany.

“Walter was the sun of our universe, the head of our family, by far the wealthiest; he owned the business that employed most of the adults, and above all, he was the reason we were all in Lima. ....Who was my uncle? Walter Neisser was a man who saved lives.”

“Yes, this is a Holocaust story, but it is also very much the story of the importance of family and a testament to the fact that one individual can make an enormous difference.”

Walter immigrated to Argentina in 1923 and the majority of this slim volume is comprised of letters to and from Walter and his family. He was a prolific letter writer and family members saved so many of them and it was through these that the author pieces together a view of the family and what was happening in the world. It is through these letters that we get a sense of the man - his willingness to take any job to get by. The first part of the book focuses on how he establishes himself as a businessman and builds a life away from Germany, away from his family moving from Argentina to Chili to Peru. In 1933 the family started to arrive and in spite of restrictions on immigration, Walter was able to arrange the move of 50 relatives.

The book is interspersed with black and white photographs which I assume will be clearer in a print version, than on a kindle. Kudos to Eva Neisser Echenberg for keeping the story alive . It is imperative that we never forget the horrific things of the Holocaust, but’s it’s good to remember the individual heros who saved people.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Skyhorse Publishing through Edelweiss.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

😲

A book mostly containing letters and old photos. Follows the life of Walter Neisser when he left Germany to start a new life in Peru before the second World War happened. These letters document the rise of Neisser & co and the fallout of Nazi Germany. Bringing over most of his family, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins etc over the many years to help them escape Germany. How Walter Neisser made is Fortune and how he sponsored many people to get a step up in life and start businesses of their own. After his death Neisser & Co unfortunately didn't survive without his guidance and after 30 years the business was In severe decline.

This was an unusual way of documenting someone's life through the holocaust but it worked and it was really interesting. Kept the pages turning learning about this man and the great things he did to better other people's lives through his hard work and good fortune.

[Samb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving story put together by surviving letters and family stories about a man determined to live a new life in the new world. Traveling from Germany to South America in the 1920s, Walter not only establishes himself in Peru but as WW2 looms, manages to help 50 members of his close and extended family survive. It is not just a holocaust story but one of perseverance and courage faced by immigrants leaving their homeland, trying to retain their culture in a very different environment.