Joseph Joffo

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Joseph Joffo (1931) is a French author.

He is a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction but perhaps best known in France and abroad for his memoirs "Un Sac de Billes" (A Bag of Marbles), which has been translated into eighteen languages. The memoirs, written in a novel fashion, tell the account of Joffo as a young boy during the Holocaust. When Joseph Joffo was ten years old, his father gave him and his brother 5,000 francs each and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris and, by foot, train and bus, join their brothers Henri and Albert in Menton on the Mediterranean coast, where they'd be safe. The book "A Bag of Marbles" tells of this journey.

Joseph and his twelve-year-older brother, Maurice, travel all around France by themselves. They are attempting to escape from the grasp of Hitler and his S.S. men as they infiltrate France. They travel through northern France to the de-militiarised zone in the South. The boys then spend four blissfully safe months in Menton with their brothers, Henri and Albert, before having to leave the town for Nice where their parents are waiting.

Joseph returns to Paris shortly after peace is announced in an over-crowded train. Maurice does also, although in his typical style he also takes enough cheese to make a very large profit on! They are both re-united with their family in the coiffeur - although sadly not their father who perished in a concentration camp before the end of the war.