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Ausländer | Michael Moritz | Granta

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T he principal character of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, for whom the book is named, recalls how he was brought as a four-year-old from Prague on a Kindertransport train to Liverpool Street station where he was met by an austere couple, a vicar and his wife from North Wales. The boy was renamed Dafydd Elias, and subsequently raised in a small village. As an adult, having reverted to his original name, Austerlitz made his way back to the Czech Republic and, unable to detect the borders between the distortions of memory and fact, relived his life as a child. As I reread Austerlitz, I came across the following passage recounting the memory of Dafydd Elias’s boyhood in Wales: I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world. And since I began investigating my own history some years ago, I have never in fact come upon another Austerlitz, not in the telephone books

Ausländer | Michael Moritz | Granta Skip to main content Ausländer Michael Moritz ‘We were Jews and we were living in plain sight.’ Memoir by Michael Moritz. T he principal character of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz , for whom the book is named, recalls how he was brought as a four-year-old from Prague on a Kindertransport train to Liverpool Street station where he was met by an austere couple, a vicar and his wife from North Wales. The boy was renamed Dafydd Elias, and subsequently raised in a small village. As an adult, having reverted to his original name, Austerlitz made his way back to t

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