"Saving Freud" with Award-Winning Journalist and Author Andrew Nagorski

Friends of the Main Library St. Augustine is pleased to welcome award-winning journalist and author Andrew Nagorski to discuss his latest book, Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.

In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger. But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon’s great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud’s devoted youngest daughter Anna, and his personal doctor. Saving Freud is the story of how this remarkable collection of people finally succeeded in coaxing Freud, a man who seemingly knew the human mind better than anyone else, to emerge from his deep state of denial about the looming catastrophe, allowing them to extricate him and his family from Austria so that they could settle in London. There Freud would live out the remaining sixteen months of his life in freedom.

Local historian and author David Nolan will introduce the program.

This program is free, open to the public, and will take place at The Waterworks, 184 San Marco Ave., which shares a parking lot with the Main Library. Seating begins at 12 PM, and the presentation starts promptly at 1 PM. No reservations are required.

For more information, please call the Main Library at 904-827-6940. The presentation will be followed by a book sale and signing (cash or check only), with partial proceeds from the sale of books benefitting Friends of the Main Library St. Augustine.

Andrew Nagorski is an award-winning journalist and author who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek. At Newsweek, he served in many capacities and locations including as senior editor of Newsweek International and as the bureau chief in Hong Kong, Warsaw, Rome, Bonn, and Moscow, where he gained international notoriety after angering the Soviet government with his reporting and being expelled from the country. In 1988, he took a one-year leave of absence to serve as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C, and from 2008 to April 2014, he was vice president and director of public policy for the EastWest Institute, an international affairs think tank.

In 2009, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski presented Nagorski with the newly created Bene Merito award for his reporting from Poland about the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. In 2011, Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded him the Cavalry Cross for the same reason. In 2014, Poland’s former President and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa presented the “Lech Walesa Media Award” to Nagorski “for dedication to the cause of freedom and writing about Poland’s history and culture.” The Overseas Press Club has also honored him for his reporting. He is the author of seven works of non-fiction and one novel, including 1941: The Year That Germany Lost the War, The Nazi Hunters, and Hitlerland. Nagorski is now based in St. Augustine, Florida but continues to travel extensively, writing for numerous publications.

The Waterworks is available through the generosity of the City of St. Augustine and the St. Johns Cultural Council.