Paul Peter Porges

Who is Paul Peter Porges?

Paul Peter Porges is an American cartoonist whose work has appeared in many places, including The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post.

Following Hitler's 1938 invasion of Austria, his shopkeeper parents sent him and his older brother Kurt to a children's camp near Paris in March 1939, Château de la Guette de Germaine de Rothschild.. In 1940–41 he was obliged to move throughout France to keep ahead of the Nazis' movements, wandering through the countryside alone at the age of thirteen. 67 years later, Porges remembered, "It was fantastic! But don't tell anyone!"

Despite his movements, Porges was ultimately captured and interned in a deportation camp. Porges escaped by hiding in a garbage collection, and was smuggled to Switzerland along with a group of other juvenile refugees in 1942. The Swiss authorities discovered the group and sent everyone but Porges back to France; Porges was spared because he was the only one younger than sixteen. He remained there for the duration of the war, attending art school, receiving his certificat d'etude, and meeting his future wife, Lucie Eisenstab. The two had been born months apart in the same hospital back in Vienna.