The Shoe in the Danube: The immigrant experience of a holocaust survivor - Paperback

by Peter George Balint (Author)

This is the remarkable story of the struggles and and obstacles overcome by an individual trying to understand his origins, and how he can fit into a new life in America.
The narrative starts with his birth during an air raid in Budapest. It deals with the multiple relocations of the family, and the eventual emigration to America. It also deals with the cultural disconnect between his youth in Germany and his subsequent academic and business career.
It tries to understand the rage that brings trauma to the family, as well as survivor's guilt.
His father was killed in the final days before the collapse of the Hitler regime. This happened on the bridge leading over the Danube at Mauthausen on a death march from the Mauthausen concentration camp to a sub-camp at Gunskirchen in Austria.
The memoir describes the aftermath of that event, as well as the prior flight of the family from Germany to Hungary after Kristallnacht.
It also focusses on his mother's determination to again become a refugee after the war, leaving communist Hungary to return to her homeland, Germany, then under US occupation. And then her subsequent emigration to the United States at age 51 with her 13 year old son.