Fonds F0472 - Eric Koch fonds

Eric Koch (1919-2018), writer, broadcaster and professor, was born on 31 August 1919 in Frankfurt, Germany. He left Germany for England as a refugee in 1935 where he attended Cranbrook School in Kent from 1935 to 1937 and later St. John's College, Cambridge from 1937 to 1940. In May 1940, he was interned as an "enemy alien" and later transported to Canada where he remained interned until 1941, following which he continued his studies at the University of Toronto. He began his career as a broadcaster with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1944 when he joined the German Section, International Service (RCI) based in Montreal. From 1953 to 1967, he was a member of the Department of Talks and Public Affairs in Toronto. He was promoted in 1967 to Area Head, Arts and Science and was responsible for the creation of a large number of radio and television programmes. From 1971 to 1977, he served as regional director (Montreal). He retired from the CBC in 1979 to devote himself to writing. He is the author of ten books of fiction, many of which were published in Germany, and four books of non-fiction including "Hilmar and Odette", which was awarded the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Writing in 1996. He was a course director at York University in the Social Science Division where he taught a course on The Politics of Canadian Broadcasting for over 15 years.