An historical novel for teenagers about a German family fleeing from the Nazis to Aberystwyth has been released.

Fleeing the Fascists by Myrddin ap Dafydd sees the family flee in the 1930s before returning to a different Germany in 1945.

Translated from the Welsh by Susan Walton, the book has been published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.

The novel is about the flight on the Kindertransport of two young children, Lotti and Anton. They are fleeing from the horrors of the Nazi regime to Wales, very shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. As passengers on the last Kindertransport train to leave Germany on 1 September 1939, just before the outbreak of hostilities, they eventually end up in Aber where they meet up with their father who has already retreated to Britain from the horrors of the Hitler regime.

He has secured employment as a lecturer in German at the local university and found lodgings at a house called Hendre Wen in Caradog Road in the town, owned by a character called Eluned Jenkins. The father, a talented linguist, learns the Welsh. A third child, Stefan, aged 17, has been called up for military training by the German authorities but succeeds in making a daring escape from Nazi Germany.

The story focuses on the German children’s experiences of the Urdd camp in Llangrannog, their discovery of Welsh language and culture, and tells the story of the wartime period from 1936 to 1950 from the perspective of both Germany and Wales.

Family and cross-border connections between Wales and Germany lead to holiday exchanges and the creation of a branch of the Welsh youth movement, the Urdd, in the German city – which is actually a piece of historical truth woven into the fiction of the novel.

Myrddin ap Dafydd is a Welsh writer, publisher and chaired bard. He has been the owner-proprietor of Gwasg Carreg Gwalch since 1980.

Readers will appreciate the many evocative references to the 1939–45 war, notably the arrival of relatively large numbers of evacuees in Aberystwyth.

Although the main characters in the novel are wholly imaginary, the work does include references to prominent Welsh figures of the time like Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, founder of Urdd Gobaith Cymru, and Nora Isaac, the .headmistress of the town’s Welsh-medium primary school.

Copies of the English translation were recently presented to a high school in Bielefeld by Markus Poch, a news reporter from the city who has been a valuable source of information in the writing process of the novel.

Markus has discovered six German survivors in Bielefeld who remembered and valued their trips to Wales.

Myrddin said: “It’s very emotional to me to see one of my novels being used as a possible bridge between Wales and a school in Germany. This is what the Urdd is all about and I’m excited by the possibilities.”