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Books > Humanities > History > European history
The astonishing, true story of a group of Jewish children who
managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and survive in the
Aryan section of the Nazi-occupied city. Sentenced to death,
hounded at every step, they kept themselves alive by peddling
cigarettes in Warsaws Three Crosses Square - where the author, a
member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, met and helped them and
recorded their story. Several of the children were finally caught
and killed, but most survived and are alive today. The story of the
cigarette sellers has been published in Polish, Romanian, Hebrew
and Yiddish, and a dramatised version has been broadcast in Israel.
The book was awarded a literary prize by the World Jewish Congress
in New York.
Bergen-Belsen was the only major Nazi concentration camp to be
liberated on the British front, some three weeks before the end of
the war in Europe in 1945. This book contains accounts which should
ensure that the horrors of the camp are on the record for posterity
and cannot be denied or excused...Although Soviet forces discovered
Majdanek, Auschwitz and other camps on their front in 1944/45, the
significance of these sites did not register in the West until much
later. It was the atrocities perpetrated at Belsen and Buchenwald,
therefore, that became headline news in the Western press in April
1945. The eyewitness reports and testimonies are as profoundly
shocking today as they were then; they are gathered in this volume
so that they will not be forgotten.
Constructing the Holocaust examines the development of Holocaust
historiography in the light of recent critical philosophy of
history. It argues that the Holocaust provides both the occasion
for, and the ultimate test of, new ways of giving meaning to the
past. It also shows that examining our representations of the past
is as important as archival research for understanding history.
This all-encompassing guide: * Includes over 600 pages of current
political, economic and social affairs of the region * Provides an
impartial perspective on all the countries and territories of
Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia * Combines detailed
analysis by acknowledged experts, the latest statistics and
invaluable directory material.
Leon Greenman was born in London in 1910. His paternal grandparents
were Dutch, and at an early age, after the death of his mother, his
family moved to Holland, where Leon eventually settled with his
wife, Esther, in Rotterdam. Leon was an antiquarian bookseller, and
as such travelled to and from London on a regular basis. In 1938,
during one such trip, he noticed people digging trenches in the
streets and queuing up for gas masks. He hurried back to Holland
with the intention of collecting his wife and return with her to
England. The whispers of war were growing louder and louder.
Eva Tichauer was born in Berlin at the end of the First World War
into a socialist Jewish family. After a happy childhood in a
well-off intellectual milieu, the destiny of her family was turned
upside-down by the rise of Hitler in 1933. They emigrated to Paris
in July of that year, and life started to become difficult. Eva was
in her second year of medical studies in 1939 when war was
declared, with fatal consequences for her and her family: they sere
forced to the Spanish frontier, then returned to Paris to a flat
which had been searched by the Gestapo. Eva was then compelled to
break off her studies due to a quota system being imposed on Jewish
students.
In this celebrated, landmark history of the Balkans, Misha Glenny
investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist
fervour that have come to define our understanding of the
south-eastern edge of Europe. In doing so, he reveals that groups
we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed
unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the
Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. And he
exposes the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and
the rest of Europe, raising profound questions about recent Western
intervention. Updated to cover the last decade's brutal conflicts
in Kosovo and Macedonia, the surge of organised crime in the
region, the rise of Turkey and the rocky road to EU membership, The
Balkans remains the essential and peerless study of Europe's most
complex and least understood region.
The Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller Shortlisted for a British Book
Industry Book of the Year Award 2016 Ancient Rome matters. Its
history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something
against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories -
from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia - still strike a
chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the
rights of the individual still influence our own debates on civil
liberty today. SPQR is a new look at Roman history from one of the
world's foremost classicists. It explores not only how Rome grew
from an insignificant village in central Italy to a power that
controlled territory from Spain to Syria, but also how the Romans
thought about themselves and their achievements, and why they are
still important to us. Covering 1,000 years of history, and casting
fresh light on the basics of Roman culture from slavery to running
water, as well as exploring democracy, migration, religious
controversy, social mobility and exploitation in the larger context
of the empire, this is a definitive history of ancient Rome. SPQR
is the Romans' own abbreviation for their state: Senatus Populusque
Romanus, 'the Senate and People of Rome'.
Germany did not have professional players or a national league
until the 1960s, yet it became one of the most successful football
nations in the world. Tor! (Goal!) traces the extraordinary story
of Germany's club and international football, from the days when it
was regarded as a dangerously foreign pastime, through the horrors
of the Nazi years to postwar triumphs and the crisis of the new
century. Tor! challenges the myth that German football is
'predictable' or 'efficient' and brings to life the fascinating
array of characters who shaped it: the betrayed pioneer Walther
Bensemann; the enigmatic genius Sepp Herberger; the all-conquering
Franz Beckenbauer; the modern misfit Lothar Matthaus. And even the
radio commentator Herbert Zimmermann, whose ecstatic cries of
'Tor!' greeted the winning goal in the 1954 World Cup final and
helped change a whole nation's view of itself. Fully revised and
updated ahead of the 2022 World Cup, Tor! is the definitive history
of German football.
'Lucid and damning ... an absorbing - and infuriating - tale of
complicity, coverup and denial' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of
EMPIRE OF PAIN A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis
helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third
Reich and World War II - and how the world allowed them to get away
with it. In 1946, Gunther Quandt - patriarch of Germany's most
iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW - was
arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he
had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt
lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have
only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their
reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of
them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic
brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the
dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz and still
control Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW has remained hidden in plain
sight - until now. In this landmark work, investigative journalist
David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany's wealthiest
business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the
atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources,
de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured
slave labourers and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler's
army as Europe burnt around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong
exposes how the wider world's political expediency enabled these
billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a
bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.
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