A memoir of brutality, heroism and personal discovery from Europe's dark heart, revealing one of the most extraordinary untold stories of the Second World War In the spring of 1945, at Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border, not far from the front lines of the advancing Red Army, Countess Margit Batthyany gave a party in her mansion. The war was almost over, and the German aristocrats and SS officers dancing and drinking knew it was lost. Late that night, they walked down to the village, where 180 enslaved Jewish labourers waited, made them strip naked, and shot them all, before returning to the bright lights of the party. It remained a secret for decades, until Sacha Batthyany, who remembered his great-aunt Margit only vaguely from his childhood as a stern, distant woman, began to ask questions about it. A Crime in the Family is Sacha Batthyany's memoir of confronting these questions, and of the answers he found. It is one of the last untold stories of Europe's nightmare century,spanning not just the massacre at Rechnitz, the inhumanity of Auschwitz, the chaos of wartime Budapest and the brutalities of Soviet occupation and Stalin's gulags, but also the silent crimes of complicity and cover-up, and the damaged generations they leave behind. Told partly through the surviving journals of others from the author's family and the vanished world of Rechnitz, A Crime in the Family is a moving and revelatory memoir in the vein of The Hare with the Amber Eyes and The House by the Lake. It uncovers barbarity and tragedy but also a measure of peace and reconciliation. Ultimately,Batthyany discovers that although his inheritance might be that of monsters, he does not bear it alone.

This book describes Holocaust reality as we have never encountered it before. From the unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger, to the budding relationships of an adolescent girl growing into womanhood during the worst of all times, the author withholds nothing. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's subtle depiction of her parents knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them, and their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, lead us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances as father, mother, or daughter. Love in a World of Sorrow features Fanya's gripping tale of survival and an updated foreword and epilogue by the author, reflecting more than a decade of experience bearing witness to the Holocaust before hundreds of audiences around the world. On the reading list at Princeton University, the University of Connecticut, and Ben Gurion Univesity of the Negev, among other, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's book is an indispensable educational tool for teaching future generations about the human potential for both good and evil.

An extraordinary true story of survival and courage through the Holocaust.Poland, 1943. It was the last refuge of the desperate, a warren of sewers underneath their city. Above, as the Nazis destroyed the ghetto of the city of Lvov, a small band of Jews escaped into a grim network of tunnels, living for fourteen months with the city's waste, the sudden floods, the fumes and the damp, the rats, the darkness, and the despair. Their only support was a lone sewer worker, an ex-criminal who constantly threatened to leave them. Many died; some falling into the rushing waters of the river, some simply of exhaustion. At one point the survivors found themselves trapped in a chamber, filling to the roof with storm-water. Yet survive they did, even infiltrating the camps above to find their missing relatives. When the Russians liberated Lvov, they emerged from the sewers filthy, bent double, emaciated, unrecognizable... but alive. This powerful story based on a long series of interviews, and a hitherto private diary, creates a blazing testimony to human faith and endurance.

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why-and more importantly how-it could have been avoided, featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican's involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican. Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared Italian Jews from the gas chambers. Examining the historical context and avoiding normative or counterfactual assertions, this book draws upon archival sources ranging from diaries to intelligence intercepts in English, Italian, and German. With antisemitism on the rise today and the last remaining witnesses passing away, it is essential to understand what happened in 1943. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome grapples with this particular, awful episode within the larger, horrifying story of the Holocaust. Despite the inadequacy of memory, we must continue to attempt to make sense of the inexplicable.

Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968) scrutinizes literary and documentary testimonies produced during or after the extermination of Jews in the Second World War and rooted in that historical, political, and anthropological context. Whether someone wrote a text during or after the war influenced the nature of what was communicated. Hence, the authors divided this publication to separately cover two periods: 1939-1944/45 and 1945-1968. This publication overviews belles-lettres, personal document literature, and press publications. Almost all texts were written in the Polish language. The genre category constitutes the basic compositional criterion. The individual parts of our publication discuss poetry, narrative prose, personal document literature, and the press discourse.

In Dachau, Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and thousands of other locations throughout the world, memorials to the Holocaust are erected to commemorate its victims and its significance. This fascinating work by James E. Young examines Holocaust monuments and museums in Europe, Israel, and America, exploring how every nation remembers the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals, and experiences, and how these memorials reflect their place in contemporary aesthetic and architectural discourse. The result is a groundbreaking study of Holocaust memory, public art, and their fusion in contemporary life. Among the issues Young discusses are: how memorials suppress as much as they commemorate; how museums tell as much about their makers as about events; the differences between memorials conceived by victims and by victimizers; and the political uses and abuses of officially cast memory. Young describes, for example, Germany's "counter monuments," one of which was designed to disappear over time, and the Polish memorials that commemorate the whole of Polish destruction through the figure of its murdered Jewish part. He compares European museums and monuments that focus primarily on the internment and killing process with Israeli memorials that include portrayals of Jewish life before and after the destruction. In his concluding chapters, he finds that American Holocaust memorials are guided no less by distinctly American ideals, such as liberty and pluralism. Interweaving graceful prose and arresting photographs, the book is eloquent testimony to the way varied cultures and nations commemorate an era that breeds guilt, shame, pain, and amnesia, but rarely pride. By reinvigorating these memorials with the stories of their origins, Young highlights the ever-changing life of memory over its seemingly frozen face in the landscape.

"An engaging, compelling and disturbing confrontation with evil ...a book that will be transformative in its call for individual and collective moral responsibility." - Michael A. Grodin, M.D., Professor and Director, Project on Medicine and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust challenges you to confront the misguided medical ethics of the Third Reich personally, and to apply the lessons learned to contemporary human subjects research. While it is comforting to believe that Nazi physicians, nurses, and bioscientists were either incompetent, mad, or few in number, they were, in fact, the best in the world at the time, and the vast majority participated in the government program of "applied biology." They were not coerced to behave as they did- they generated the eugenic theories that rationally led them to design horrendous medical experiments, gas chambers, euthanasia programs and, ultimately, mass murder in the concentration camps. Americans provided financial support for their research, modeled their medical education and research after the Germans, and continued to perform unethical human subjects research even after the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. The German Medical Association apologized in 2012 for the behavior of its physicians during the Third Reich. By examining the medical crimes of human subjects researchers during the Third Reich, you will naturally examine your own behavior and that of your colleagues, and perhaps ask yourself "If the best physicians and bioscientists of the early 20th century could treat human beings as they did, can I be certain that I will never do the same?" * Presents relatively unknown aspects of human subjects research during the Third Reich * Reveals surprising relationships between German and American human subjects research * Dispels myths about Nazi human subjects research * Compels introspection and self-examination by

"Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." . Sir Martin Gilbert "Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. ...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." . From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett] Together with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return. Ewald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

Adolf Eichmann was the operational manager of the genocide that dispatched six million European Jews to the gas chambers. Escaping US custody in 1946, he hid in various locations in Germany before absconding in 1950 via a 'ratline' escape route to Argentina, where he lived, undisturbed, for the next decade. On 11 May 1960 he was captured in an operation of breathtaking skill and daring by a team of Mossad agents in a Buenos Aires suburb. Smuggled out of Argentina to Israel, Eichmann was indicted there on charges of crimes against humanity, and hanged on 1 June 1962. Part history, part detective story, part international thriller, Hunting Eichmann brings the story of the fifteen-year search for Eichmann more thrillingly, more accurately, more completely to life than ever before. Superbly researched and relentlessly paced, Hunting Eichmann brings us closer to understanding the architect of the Holocaust than ever before - a man whose terrifying ordinariness came to embody the 'banality of evil'.

Although often overlooked, anti-Polish sentiment was central to Nazi ideology. At the outset of World War II, Hitler initiated a process of 'depolonization' (Entpolonisierung) which resulted in the death or displacement of a significant number of Polish people living in Nazi-occupied territories. By examining policies of indirect extermination through a detailed study of Szmalcowka, a 'displacement' camp located in Toru? in Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, Tomasz Ceran explores the terrible consequences of Nazi ideology. He provides both an in-depth historical account of a little-known camp and an important analysis of Nazi practices and policy-making in the Polish territories which were annexed. A strong addition to World War II literature, Ceran's book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in World War II, Polish History, Nazi ideology and the nature of violence and resilience.