Escaping the Holocaust and Fighting the Nazis. 1938 - 1948
The extraordinary memoir of a living veteran, who was witness and protagonist of World War II and the Diaspora of millions of Jews forced to migrate across borders. It is also the story of a boy growing into a man, whose identity is shaped in wartime, as he ponders on war values, idealism, national identity, migration, first love, and family ties.
Rudi Haymann was born in 1921 in Berlin into a German-Jewish family. Expelled by the Nazis in 1938, he escaped to British Palestine, where he became a Kibbutz pioneer. When the Nazi army advanced into Africa, Rudi joined the British Army’s Intelligence Service and fought in Africa, Italy, and Greece. After the war, in 1948, Rudi settled in Chile, where his parents and sister had found refuge. There, he followed his passion and became an interior designer, pioneering a “modernist” design style, that did not exist in the country at the time. In his late seventies, Rudi decided to share his story; he trained himself to write and penned two books, published originally in Spanish. He is currently working on his next book, about his experience as a Designer.
