Eric Koch

Eric Otto Koch (31 August 1919 – 28 April 2018) was a German-born Canadian author, broadcaster and academic.

Life Koch was born in 1919 into a prominent assimilated German Jewish family. His grandfather was a court jeweller and his father, Otto, was an officer in the German Army during World War I

In 1935, after the Nazis took power, he was sent by his family to boarding school in England, where he was enrolled at Cranbrook School in Kent before enrolling at St. John's College, Cambridge, to study economics and then law. In 1940, he and other Germans resident in Britain were detained as enemy aliens. Koch was deported to Canada where he remained at an internment camp in Sherbrooke, Quebec until 1941 when he and most of his fellow internees were recognised by the government as "victims of Nazi aggression" and released. His mother, who had escaped Germany before war broke out, contacted the Birks family in Montreal, jewellers who were friends of the Koch family, and put him in their care. His guardians suggested he change his name from Otto as it was too German a name to have in wartime and so Koch anglicized his original name of Erich to Eric. The French Kiss, about Charles de Gaulle and Quebec, Hilmar and Odette, the story of two of his half-Jewish relatives who remained in Germany during World War II and their contrasting fates, was awarded the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Writing in 1996.

Works

Satirical fiction The French Kiss: A Tongue-In-Cheek Political Fantasy (1969) The Leisure Riots (1973) The Last Thing You'd Want to Know (1976) Goodnight, Little Spy (1979)

Historical fiction Icon In Love: A Novel About Goethe (1999) The Man Who Knew Charlie Chaplin (2000) Earrings: Baden-Baden 1885 (2002) Premonitions: A novel (2008) Arabian nights! 1914: a novel about Kaiser Wilhelm II (2010) The Weimar Triangle (2010) Beethoven’s Locket (2018)

Science fiction Kassandrus (1988) C.R.U.P.P.: Two Science Fiction Novels (1990; contains The Leisure Riots and The Last Thing You'd Want to Know)

Non-fiction Success of a mission: Lord Durham in Canada (1961) Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder (1985) (biographical) Inside Seven Days: The Show That Shook the Nation (1986) Hilmar and Odette: Two Stories from the Nazi Era (1995) The Brothers Hambourg (1997) I Remember the Location Exactly (2010) (family history) The Golden Years: Encounters with Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Lester B. Pearson, René Lévesque and John G. Diefenbaker (2013) Otto and Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man's Land (2016) (biographical)