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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
'He had the dream again last night... He taps the gloves of his unbeaten Polish opponent. There are rumours that the loser will be sent to the gas chamber.' In 1943, the Dutch champion boxer, Leen Sanders, was sent to Auschwitz. His wife and children were put to death while he was sent 'to the left' with the others who were fit enough for labour. Recognised by an SS officer, he was earmarked for a 'privileged' post in the kitchens in exchange for weekly boxing matches for the entertainment of the Nazi guards. From there, he enacted his resistance to their limitless cruelty. With great risk and danger to his own life, Leen stole, concealed and smuggled food and clothing from SS nursing units for years to alleviate the unbearable suffering of the prisoners in need. He also regularly supplied extra food to the Dutch women in Dr. Mengele's experiment, Block 10. To his fellow Jews in the camp, he acted as a rescuer, leader and role model, defending them even on their bitter death march to Dachau towards the end of the war. A story of astonishing resilience and compassion, The Fighter of Auschwitz is a testament to the endurance of humanity in the face of extraordinary evil.
A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel
In this definitive new biography, Carol Ann Lee provides the answer to one of the most heartbreaking questions of modern times: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis? Probing this startling act of treachery, Lee brings to light never before documented information about Otto Frank and the individual who would claim responsibility -- revealing a terrifying relationship that lasted until the day Frank died. Based upon impeccable research into rare archives and filled with excerpts from the secret journal that Frank kept from the day of his liberation until his return to the Secret Annex in 1945, this landmark biography at last brings into focus the life of a little-understood man -- whose story illuminates some of the most harrowing and memorable events of the last century.
In August 1945 Great Britain, France, the USSR, and the United States established a tribunal at Nuremberg to try military and civilian leaders of the Nazi regime. G. M. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, had an unrivaled firsthand opportunity to watch and question the Nazi war criminals. With scientific dispassion he encouraged Goeering, Speer, Hess, Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl, Keitel, Streicher, and the others to reveal their innermost thoughts. In the process Gilbert exposed what motivated them to create the distorted Aryan utopia and the nightmarish worlds of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. Here are their day-to-day reactions to the trial proceedings their off-the-record opinions of Hitler, the Third Reich, and each other their views on slave labour, death camps, and the Jews their testimony, feuds, and desperate maneuverings to dissociate themselves from the Third Reich's defeat and Nazi guilt. Dr. Gilbert's thorough knowledge of German, deliberately informal approach, and complete freedom of access at all times to the defendants give his spellbinding, chilling study an intimacy and insight that remains unequaled.
The Nazis spared their lives because they were twins. In the summer of 1944, Eva Mozes Kor and her family arrived at Auschwitz. Within thirty minutes, they were separated. Her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, while Eva and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man who became known as the Angel of Death: Dr. Josef Mengele. They were 10 years old. While twins at Auschwitz were granted the 'privileges' of keeping their own clothes and hair, they were also subjected to Mengele's sadistic medical experiments. They were forced to fight daily for their own survival and many died as a result of the experiments, or from the disease and hunger rife in the concentration camp. In a narrative told simply, with emotion and astonishing restraint, The Twins of Auschwitz shares the inspirational story of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil. Also included is an epilogue on Eva's incredible recovery and her remarkable decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Through her museum and her lectures, she dedicated her life to giving testimony on the Holocaust, providing a message of hope for people who have suffered, and worked toward goals of forgiveness, peace, and the elimination of hatred and prejudice in the world.
Invisible Ink is the story of Guy Stern's remarkable life. This is not a Holocaust memoir; however, Stern makes it clear that the horrors of the Holocaust and his remarkable escape from Nazi Germany created the central driving force for the rest of his life. Stern gives much credit to his father's profound cautionary words, "You have to be like invisible ink. You will leave traces of your existence when, in better times, we can emerge again and show ourselves as the individuals we are." Stern carried these words and their psychological impact for much of his life, shaping himself around them, until his emergence as someone who would be visible to thousands over the years. This book is divided into thirteen chapters, each marking a pivotal moment in Stern's life. His story begins with Stern's parents-"the two met, or else this chronicle would not have seen the light of day (nor me, for that matter)." Then, in 1933, the Nazis come to power, ushering in a fiery and destructive timeline that Stern recollects by exact dates and calls "the end of [his] childhood and adolescence." Through a series of fortunate occurrences, Stern immigrated to the United States at the tender age of fifteen. While attending St. Louis University, Stern was drafted into the U.S. Army and soon found himself selected, along with other German-speaking immigrants, for a special military intelligence unit that would come to be known as the Ritchie Boys (named so because their training took place at Ft. Ritchie, MD). Their primary job was to interrogate Nazi prisoners, often on the front lines. Although his family did not survive the war (the details of which the reader is spared), Stern did. He has gone on to have a long and illustrious career as a scholar, author, husband and father, mentor, decorated veteran, and friend. Invisible Ink is a story that will have a lasting impact. If one can name a singular characteristic that gives Stern strength time after time, it is his resolute determination to persevere. To that end Stern's memoir provides hope, strength, and graciousness in times of uncertainty.
For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. Living in America after the war, she kept hidden from her children any hint of her epic, inhuman odyssey. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary without ever mentioning them. Only in 1991, on the eve of heart surgery, did she suddenly present them to Ann, her daughter, and offer to answer any questions Ann wished to ask. When Sala first reported to a camp in Geppersdorf, Germany, at the age of sixteen, she thought it would be for six weeks. Five years later, she was still at a labor camp and only she and two of her sisters remained alive of an extended family of fifty. "Sala's Gift" is a heartbreaking, eye-opening story of survival and love amidst history's worst nightmare.
A TRUE CELEBRATION OF HEROISM AND BRAVERY From America's preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes a brilliant telling of World War II in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. The author himself drew this authoritative narrative account from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, to yield what has been called "the best single-volume history of the war that most of us will ever read."
THE AWARDWINNING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'One of those rare and eternal stories you don't want to end and that leave you forever changed' - Desmond Tutu 'A masterpiece of holocaust literature. Her memoir, like her life, is extraordinary, harrowing and inspiring in equal measure' – The Times Literary Supplement 'Little dancer', Mengele says, ‘dance for me’ In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. The horrors of the Holocaust didn't break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story. It shows that hope can flower in the most unlikely places.
What are you willing to do to survive? What are you willing to endure if it means you might live? 'Achingly moving, gives much-needed hope . . . Deserves the status both as a valuable historical source and as a stand-out memoir' Daily Express 'A story that needs to be heard' 5***** Reader Review Entering Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp, Franci was expected to die. She refused. In the summer of 1942, twenty-two-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labour camps in Hamburg, and finally to Bergen Belsen. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. Having endured the transportation of her parents, she never forgot her mother's parting words: 'Your only duty to us is to stay alive'. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele, and claim to be an electrician. A split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life. Unpublished for 50 years, Franci's War is an astonishing account of one woman's attempt to survive. Heartbreaking and candid, Franci finds the light in her darkest years and the horrors she faces instill in her, strength and resilience to survive and to live again. She gives a voice to the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends. Her testimony sheds new light on the alliances, love affairs, and sexual barter that took place during the Holocaust, offering a compelling insight into the resilience and courage of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Above all, Franci's War asks us to explore what it takes to survive, and what it means to truly live. 'A candid account of shocking events. Franci is someone many women today will be able to identify with' 5***** Reader Review 'First-hand accounts of life in Nazi death camps never lose their terrible power but few are as extraordinary as Franci's War' Mail on Sunday 'Fascinating and traumatic. Well worth a read' 5***** Reader Review
How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was it on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, and fears of the Anglo-Jewish community? This book studies the priorities of that community, and thereby seeks to analyse the attitudes and philosophies which informed actions. It paints a picture of Anglo-Jewish life and its reactions to a wide range of matters in the non-Jewish world. Richard Bolchover charts the transmission of the news of the European catastrophe and discusses the various theories regarding reactions to these exceptional circumstances. He investigates the structures and political philosophies of Anglo-Jewry during the war years and covers the reactions of Jewish political and religious leaders as well as prominent Jews acting outside the community's institutional framework. Various co-ordinated responses, political and philanthropic, are studied, as are the issues which dominated the community at that time, namely internal conflict and the fear of increased domestic antisemitism: these preoccupations inevitably affected responses to events in Europe. The latter half of the book looks at the ramifications of the community's socio-political philosophies including, most radically, Zionism, and their influence on communal reactions. This acclaimed study raises major questions about the structures and priorities of the British Jewish community. For this paperback, the author has added a new Introduction summarizing research in the field since the book's first appearance.
6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but this is only half the story. Doris Bergen reveals how the Holocaust extended beyond the Jews to engulf millions of other victims in related programmes of mas-murder. The Nazi killing machine began with the disabled, and went on to target Afro-Germans, Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, French African soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual men and Jehovah's Witnesses. As Nazi Germany conquered more territories and peoples, Hitler's war turned soldiers, police officers and doctors into trained killers, creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as a wealth of rarely seen photographs, Doris Bergen shows the true extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe during the Second World War, in a gripping story of the lives and deaths of real people.
Evie and Lottie are twin sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Evie's sharp and funny. Lottie's a day-dreamer. Evie's the fighter, Lottie's the peace-maker. What they do have in common is their Jewishness - even though the family isn't religious. When their mother gets a high-profile job and is targeted by antisemitic trolls on social media, the girls brush it off at first - but then the threats start getting uglier. . . What We're Scared Of is a taut thriller, a tale of sibling friendship and rivalry - and a searing look at what happens when you scratch beneath the surface.
A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection One of the most famous accounts of living under the Nazi regime of World War II comes from the diary of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Today, The Diary of a Young Girl has sold over 25 million copies world-wide; this is the definitive edition released to mark the 70th anniversary of the day the diary begins. '12 June 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support' The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most celebrated and enduring books of the last century. Tens of millions have read it since it was first published in 1947 and it remains a deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. This definitive edition restores thirty per cent if the original manuscript, which was deleted from the original edition. It reveals Anne as a teenage girl who fretted about and tried to cope with her own emerging sexuality and who also veered between being a carefree child and an aware adult. Anne Frank and her family fled the horrors of Nazi occupation by hiding in the back of a warehouse in Amsterdam for two years with another family and a German dentist. Aged thirteen when she went into the secret annexe, Anne kept a diary. She movingly revealed how the eight people living under these extraordinary conditions coped with hunger, the daily threat of discovery and death and being cut off from the outside world, as well as petty misunderstandings and the unbearable strain of living like prisoners. The Diary of a Young Girl is a timeless true story to be rediscovered by each new generation. For young readers and adults it continues to bring to life Anne's extraordinary courage and struggle throughout her ordeal. This is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was born on the 12 June 1929. She died while imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, three months short of her sixteenth birthday. This seventieth anniversary, definitive edition of The Diary of a Young Girl is poignant, heartbreaking and a book that everyone should read.
One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil. At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding. Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.
Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them-as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children-often branded "the lucky ones"-had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.
Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.
The Sunday Times top 10 bestseller The incredibly moving and powerful memoir of an Auschwitz survivor who made headlines around the world. With a foreword by King Charles III. 'Unforgettable' - Daily Mail When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he'd written 'Good luck and happiness'. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance. In Lily's Promise she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe. She describes the inhumanity of the camp and the small acts of defiance that gave her strength. From there she and her sisters became slave labour in a munitions factory, and then faced a death march that they barely survived. Lily lost so much, but she built a new life for herself and her family, first in Israel and then in London. It wasn't easy; the pain of her past was always with her, but this extraordinary woman found the strength to speak out in the hope that such evil would never happen again. 'Utterly compelling, heartbreaking, truthful and yet redemptive, a memoir of the Holocaust, a testimony of irrepressible spirit and an unforgettable family chronicle, written in lucid prose by a truly remarkable woman . . . I couldn't stop reading it.' - Simon Sebag Montefiore
A little girl is smuggled out of a Jewish ghetto. Two courageous women. And an inspirational story of survival. In 1941 at the height of World War II, in a Polish ghetto, a baby girl named Rachel is born. Her parents, Jacob and Zippa, are willing to do anything to keep her alive. They nickname her Lalechka. Just before Lalechka's first birthday, the Nazis begin to systematically murder everyone in the ghetto. Her father understands that staying in the ghetto will mean certain death for his child. In both desperation and hope, Lalechka's parents decide to save their daughter, no matter the cost. Zippa smuggles her outside the boundaries of the ghetto where her Polish friends, Irena and Sophia, are waiting. She entrusts their beloved Lalechka to them and returns to the ghetto to remain with her husband and parents - unaware of the fate that awaits her. Irena and Sophia take on the burden of caring for Lalechka during the war, pretending she is part of their family despite the grave danger of being discovered and executed. Holocaust Child is based on the unique journal written by Zippa during the annihilation of the ghetto, as well as on interviews with key figures in the story, rare documents, and authentic letters. It is a story of hope in the face of terror.
National Book Award winner Neal Shusterman presents a graphic novel exploring the Holocaust through surreal visions and a textured canvas of heroism and hope. Courage to Dream plunges readers into the darkest time of human history - the Holocaust. This graphic novel explores one of the greatest atrocities in modern memory, delving into the core of what it means to face the extinction of everything and everyone you hold dear. This gripping, multifaceted tapestry is woven from Jewish folklore and cultural history Five interlocking narratives explore one common story - the tradition of resistance and uplift Internationally renowned author Neal Shusterman and illustrator Andres Vera Martinez have created a masterwork that encourages the compassionate, bold reaching for a dream
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