The Children of Chateau de La Hille

A Memoir by Sebastian Steiger

Preface by Henry Massie

Lexographic Press, Chicago, IL, 2017 (Lexographicpress.com, and Amazon)

A French friend gave me Sebastian Steiger’s remarkable World War II memoir—available only in French and German. I arranged for the memoir’s translation into English by Jocelyn Hoy, its American publication, and contributed a preface. This story has relevance to our own time when so many children are fleeing deprivation and war. Steiger was a young Swiss school teacher and Red Cross volunteer who helped save from the Nazis nearly one hundred children in an abandoned chateau at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in France. The background photo at the top of the website, taken by Steiger’s son Pascal, shows the Chateau de La Hille and its village, dots in the wilderness. The children’s parents had already been sent to death camps. Steiger’s spellbinding chronicle includes excerpts from the children’s own diaries and inevitably invites comparisons to the Diary of Anne Frank. But it is less tragic; all but a handful of the young refugees survived and years later reunited with their teacher.