The Boy Who Vanished

The incredible true account of a young Jewish student who, in a desperate gambit to escape the Nazis, went underground in his hometown of Berlin, posing as an Aryan with another young escapee—a harrowing ordeal that he would miraculously escape not only with his life, but also with a love that would last a lifetime.

In 1933, the year that Hitler seized power in Germany, Ernest Fontheim was a bookish and playful 11-year-old, leading a charmed existence in Berlin with his assimilated upper-class Jewish family. In less than a decade, the Fontheims’ fortunes irrevocably changed: By 1941, Ernest’s father had been stripped of his law license, their luxurious apartment had been usurped by a Nazi official, and Ernest, now 19, had been forced into labor at the Siemens munitions factory. First his girlfriend, then his best friend, and then his entire immediate family were “deported to the East,” sent to fates unknown.

Finally, in desperation, Ernest approached his friend at Siemens, the charming Margot Hass, with a plan: along with her parents, they would go underground, posing as an Aryan family in order to avoid the roundups. Ernest and the Hasses soon joined the ranks of the roughly 6,500 Berlin Jews who went into hiding after deportations to the camps began. Most of the invisibles were caught within the first few weeks or months. But incredibly, this little group—joined by fate and by choice—would survive not only the terror of the war but also the chaos of its aftermath, when Ernest found himself facing death on numerous occasions at the hands of their Soviet liberators.

An instant classic, The Boy Who Vanished is the stunning tale of a young man’s struggle to hold onto his humanity in a country gone mad—and his unlikely triumph over the forces of darkness.