The Runaway Family deals with the beginnings of persecution of Jews in Germany under nazi rule, up to the point where a few, mostly children, were allowed to escape officially, travelling on trains out of Germany, by letting Jewish organisations abroad provide foster homes where they could be taken care of. The beginning of the story is not exactly beginning of the persecution of Jews, only of the nazi methodical escalation of it until they were massacred in millions.
This book deals in a novel form by portraying the tale of a family of parents and four very young children who have to run from place to place, hiding from persecution, trying to survive, in face of the poverty imposed on Jews via confiscation of properties and deprivation of work sources. Food is difficult to manage, too, what with Jews being forbidden from most activities including buying food, or walking in park, or being in playgrounds.
Even when familiar with the general theme of how persecution works, when reading it hits one anew, how vicious and mindless, how heartless this persecution was, rendering humans to a non human state de jure, and too how the people around often accepted and even joined in the persecution, however much most now assert they knew nothing then.
This book ends well, with this particular family escaping to England safely, albeit not all at once. But the author is very good at the descriptions of various stages of their travails, which are in all likelihood experiences of various families and people who lived at that time in those regions and went through this and lived to tell.
