Novel Smuggled Away from Nazi-Era Germany in a Cake

What a cool story, care of The Guardian. A manuscript that was baked into a cake and taken out of Nazi Germany is being reprinted by Faber & Faber.

From the piece...

Jan Petersen's Our Street tells the true story of left-wing resistance in the fascist Germany of the 1930s. Set on Wallstrasse, in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin during the period from just before Hitler became chancellor to the early days of Nazi government, the book – a fictionalised version of events to avoid reprisals for those still working in the underground in Germany – tells of the violence exacted on the street's inhabitants in revenge for the killing of a stormtrooper. It opens by printing the names of 18 victims, "The Charlottenburg Death List".

Petersen, a communist whose name was twice put on the Gestapo's black list, finished the manuscript in 1934 and made two copies, sending one to Hamburg where it was to be taken to England by a German soldier but was eventually thrown into the sea to avoid last-minute detection. Friends tried to smuggle a second to Czechoslovakia, but months went by with no word, so Petersen decided to take the third – and final – copy to Prague himself. He baked the manuscript into two cakes and, dressed in skiing clothes to give the impression he was going on holiday, he smuggled it past the SS guards.