Description
From Nazi Vienna to the Colorado slopes: an extraordinary family memoir. Born Karl Schanzer in Vienna in 1929, Charles Paterson fled Austria after the 1938 Anschluss — through Czechoslovakia to a reunion in America in the late 1940s — and rebuilt his life from nothing. Escape Home, co-written with his daughter Carrie, tells that story across 570 illustrated pages.
Trained as an architectural designer and an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, Paterson became a ski pioneer in Aspen, Colorado, where he made his home. His memoir examines how architecture — and the very act of building — became his answer to displacement: a way to root a life that history had torn up. The 200 illustrations — photographs, drawings, documents — make the journey vividly real.
Epic, moving, and beautifully illustrated. For lovers of immigration stories, architecture, and the American West. A family epic for our time, and a testament to what rebuilding really takes.
What happens to a family when history gives it no choice but to run? Escape Home is the family memoir of Charles Paterson — born Karl Schanzer in Vienna in 1929 — who fled Nazi-occupied Austria after the 1938 Anschluss and rebuilt his life in America. Co-written with his daughter Carrie Paterson, the 570-page volume with 200 illustrations traces the family’s flight through Czechoslovakia, their reunion in the United States in the late 1940s, and Charles’s remarkable second act.
Trained as an architectural designer and an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, Paterson became a ski pioneer in Aspen, Colorado, where he made his home. His memoir examines how architecture — and the act of building — became a form of perseverance: giving shape to loss, exile, and renewal. Drawing on letters, documents, photographs, and family records, the book is at once a Holocaust-era family history, a portrait of Viennese culture on the brink, and an ode to mid-century American modernism.
Inside the memoir:
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- A firsthand account of a Viennese family’s flight after the 1938 Anschluss
- Paterson’s path from refugee to Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice and Aspen ski pioneer
- 200 illustrations, letters, and documents assembled with his daughter Carrie
- How rebuilding a home — in wood, stone, and memory — answers exile
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For readers of Holocaust memoirs, architectural biography, and family history, Escape Home is an engrossing, fully documented saga of survival and reinvention.
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