I Have Seen the Mississippi

When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, eleven-year-old Ivo Lederer and his family were forced to flee. They escaped by using false papers, then bribed their way onto a small fishing boat that crossed the Adriatic by night. Quickly arrested by Italian fascists, they escaped again. They then hid for three years in Italy before boarding the only ship of European refugees brought to the United States during World War II, outside the meager quotas. After arriving in New York Harbor, they were interned by the U.S. Government behind barbed wire in Oswego, New York, until after the war. A true story, published here for the first time, this is the vivid and deeply humane memoir of a child’s escape from Europe to America, and of the life that followed.