On Sunday, July 24, 1960, Jan Rocek—along with his wife, mother-in-law, and two small boys—jumped over the railing on the East German ferry, the Seebad Ahlbeck, and down into the water at the harbour in Gedser, Denmark. The next day, the family’s closest friends tried to repeat that feat, thereby ending decades of oppression for two Jewish families in Eastern Europe.

ESCAPE is the unbelievable story of surviving Nazis atrocities in the concentration camp in Auschwitz, being trapped behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, and finally escaping Communism via Denmark.

The book is a spectacular tale about life in totalitarian darkness and the longing for freedom—an extraordinary story of seeing most of a family exterminated and then the survivors seeking a new life through a daring and hair-raising escape from Prague and then north through East Germany, Denmark, and eventually to England and the United States.

Jesper Clemmensen (b. 1975) is a Danish journalist and award-winning non-fiction author.

Jesper Clemmensen

Books