Koch was born in 1919 into a prominent assimilated
German Jewish family. His grandfather was a court
jeweller and his father, Otto, was an officer in the
German Army during
World War I In 1935, after the Nazis took power, he was sent by his family to
boarding school in England, where he was enrolled at
Cranbrook School in
Kent before enrolling at
St. John's College, Cambridge, to study economics and then law. In 1940, he and other Germans resident in Britain were detained as
enemy aliens. Koch was deported to Canada where he remained at an internment camp in
Sherbrooke, Quebec until 1941 when he and most of his fellow internees were recognised by the government as "victims of Nazi aggression" and released. His mother, who had escaped Germany before war broke out, contacted the Birks family in Montreal, jewellers who were friends of the Koch family, and put him in their care. His guardians suggested he change his name from Otto as it was too German a name to have in wartime and so Koch anglicized his original name of Erich to Eric.
The French Kiss, about
Charles de Gaulle and
Quebec,
Hilmar and Odette, the story of two of his half-Jewish relatives who remained in Germany during World War II and their contrasting fates, was awarded the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Writing in 1996. ==Works==