September 19, 1932

Nowhere in Africa, (1995, in German) is a novel sketching the life of a Jewish family in colonial Africa (Kenya) after their escape from Nazi Germany. In 2003 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to the cinematic portrayal of the story.

The original book is an autobiographical account by Stefanie Zweig ( (September 19, 1932 to April 25 2014). In the book, a six year old child arrives in the British colony, with a father she describes as " a little gray mouse then and afraid of every cat".

Her New York Times obituary sketches her life after the war ends:

Returning to bombed-out Frankfurt in 1947, the family joined a hungry, traumatized population in rebuilding the country. Scores of their German relatives were missing. None had been heard from since the start of the war in 1939, except a grandmother, who got a letter out in 1941 with the help of the Red Cross.

“They were only allowed to write 20 words,” Ms. Zweig told an interviewer in 2003. “My grandmother wrote — ‘We are very excited. We are going to Poland tomorrow.’ ” ....

But her father cautioned her against indiscriminate hatred, she wrote in an essay in The Guardian in 2003. As a child she was not allowed to hate all Germans, she said, “only the Nazis.”

For a year after returning to Frankfurt, the family lived in one room at the city’s former Jewish hospital. She wrote, “We spent our days hunting for food and our evenings wondering why nearly every German we talked to told us that they had always hated Hitler and had felt pity for the persecuted Jews.”

Her father became a judge in the post war German court system. Stefanie Zweig became a journalist, and novelist.  Among her other books are Irgendwo in Deutschland (Somewhere in Germany) (1996), (a sequel). And her memoirs were published in 2012: Nowhere was Home: My Life on two Continents.

We'll end our glimpse of this other world with these words from her New York Times obit:

Ms. Zweig wrote "Nowhere in Africa” in German, as she did all her books, but admitted to remaining unsure throughout her life whether English or German was her true native language.  “I count in English, [and] adore Alice in Wonderland, ...” she wrote in her Guardian essay, “and I am still hunting for the humor in German jokes.”