Refugees

Three children with a common mission: escape!

Josef, a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, sees his life take a dark turn. He just wanted to be a normal kid, plan his bar mitzvah, and play with his friends. But with the threat of concentration camps spreading across the country, he and his family must leave Germany and decide to board a ship bound for Cuba in search of a new home.

The year is 1994. Isabel, a Cuban girl living in Havana, watches her country ravaged by hunger and increasingly violent daily protests. For her and her family, hope lies in a small, makeshift boat bound for the United States. But do they have a chance of surviving the sea, the sharks, and the American Coast Guard?

Mahmoud is a Syrian boy who saw his hometown of Aleppo reduced to rubble. His parents can no longer hide the fear in their eyes, and his younger brother has become completely apathetic, as if oblivious to the frequent deaths and bombings around him. With no other option, the family begins a long journey toward a new home in Germany.

In Refugees , the stories of Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud, three young people of very different nationalities and historical periods, intersect in a simultaneous narrative. All of them, alongside their families, face unimaginable dangers, such as shipwrecks, bombings, and betrayal, on their journeys of escape into exile. Three trajectories separated by continents and decades, but connected by the same search for freedom and hope.

"Gratz achieves nothing short of brilliance, offering a deftly crafted narrative with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future (...) Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate, pulsing with impactful emotion, adventure, and suspense." —Kirkus Review

"[A] powerful novel (...) Filled with tragic loss and enormous resilience, these memorable, well-crafted stories contextualize and give voice to today's refugee crises, underscoring that these journeys are born of desperate need." —Publisher: Weekly