This is the story of Chęciny, my hometown in southern Poland, and of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the 20th Century.

The Nazi invasion of Poland in October 1939 started World War II. Millions of Polish Jews died in the ensuing Holocaust, including 4,000 citizens of Chęciny, and 50 members of my family. I was lucky: my mother, brother, three sisters and I had joined my father in America in 1930. I finished high school in Chicago, went to college and graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School. I became a doctor and a psychiatrist, setting up a long and rewarding private practice in Los Angeles that spanned more than 50 years.

Like the wall paintings in Pompeii, which offer a glimpse into the daily life of that city before the volcano, I hope that these stories offer a glimpse into the daily life of my hometown before the Holocaust.

But most of all, this is the story of my family, and a tribute to my beloved Aunt Chana and her daughter, my cousin Rachel, whose courage and self-sacrifice saved Miriam - Chęciny's youngest survivor of the Holocaust - from the Nazi murderers.

This is my memoir - a true story about victims of World War II and their life in concentration camp, their fears and their dreams, their relations with others, and their struggle on a journey to make a home in exile. It is also a story of adventure, danger and death. Above all, however, it is my story, a story of very important part of my life - my youth. Those events took place a long time ago. The people are real and so are their names. I have told it with complete honesty as I saw it, observe it, and experienced it. In order to make reading of this book more interesting I wrote it in a form of a novel. Some of the words within quotation marks are not necessarily of the speaker, for they have been said a long time ago, and my recollection of them is not always accurate. In other words, I'm giving in this book only the general ideas of the speakers and not their exact words, except when speaker is yours truly. Never the less, this book is a true account of my life in exile and is should be regarded as such.

This is the first biography in English of a World War II heroine of the Greek resistance, who joined the British secret intelligence services (SIS) shortly after the German occupation of Athens and was betrayed, arrested and executed one month before the Germans' departure. She was a prosperous housewife with seven children, who had no experience in politics or military affairs, and yet she managed to build a formidable escape, espionage and sabotage organization that interacted with the highest levels of SIS agents in Occupied Greece. Book Presentation with Prof. Stylianos Perrakis (Concordia University), Prof. Stathis Kalyvas (University of Oxford), and Prof. Gonda van Steen (King's College London)

Based on the heart-breaking true story of Cilka Klein, Cilka's Journey is a million copy international bestseller and the sequel to the No.1 bestselling phenomenon, The Tattooist of Auschwitz 'She was the bravest person I ever met' Lale Sokolov, The Tattooist of Auschwitz In 1942 Cilka Klein is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator by the Russians and sent to a desolate, brutal prison camp in Siberia known as Vorkuta, inside the Arctic Circle. Innocent, imprisoned once again, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, each day a battle for survival. Cilka befriends a woman doctor, and learns to nurse the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under unimaginable conditions. And when she tends to a man called Alexandr, Cilka finds that despite everything, there is room in her heart for love. Cilka's Journey is a powerful testament to the triumph of the human will. It will move you to tears, but it will also leave you astonished and uplifted by one woman's fierce determination to survive, against all odds. Don't miss Heather Morris's next book, Stories of Hope. Out now. - - - - - - - - 'Her truly incredible story is one to be read by everyone.' Sun 'Cilka's extraordinary courage in the face of evil and her determination to survive against the odds will stay with you long after you've finished reading this heartrending book.' Sunday Express 'Her courage and determination to survive makes for a heartrending read.' Daily Mirror

The Holocaust is one of the most intensively studied phenomena in modern history. The volume of writing that fuels the numerous debates about it is overwhelming in quantity and diversity. Even those who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding the Holocaust cannot assimilate it all.
There is, then, an urgent need to synthesize and evaluate the complex historiography on the Holocaust, exploring the major themes and debates relating to it and drawing widely on the findings of a great deal of research. Concentrating on the work of the last two decades, Histories of the Holocaust examines the "Final Solution" as a European project, the decision-making process, perpetrator research, plunder and collaboration, regional studies, ghettos, camps, race science, antisemitic ideology, and recent debates concerning modernity, organization theory, colonialism, genocide studies, and cultural history. Research on victims is discussed, but Stone focuses more closely on perpetrators, reflecting trends within the historiography, as well as his own view that in order to understand Nazi genocide the emphasis must be on the culture of the perpetrators.
The book is not a "history of the history of the Holocaust," offering simply a description of developments in historiography. Stone critically analyses the literature, discerning major themes and trends and assessing the achievements and shortcomings of the various approaches. He demonstrates that there never can or should be a single history of the Holocaust and facilitates an understanding of the genocide of the Jews from a multiplicity of angles. An understanding of how the Holocaust could have happened can only be achieved by recourse to histories of the Holocaust: detailed day-by-day accounts of high-level decision-making; long-term narratives of the Holocaust's relationship to European histories of colonialism and warfare; micro-historical studies of Jewish life before, during, and after Nazi occupation; and cultural analyses of Nazi fantasies and fears.

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema's engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman's confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Lozinski, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland's aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory: Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred. A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope.

Josef Rosin's "Preserving Our Litvak Heritage" is a monumental work documenting the history of 31 Jewish communities in Lithuanaia from their inception to their total destruction in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis and their Lithuania helpers. Rosin gathered his material from traditional sources, archives, public records, and remembrance books. He has enriched and enhanced the entry for each community with personal memoirs and contributions from widely dispersed survivors who opened family albums and shared treasured photographs of family and friends. He made use of sources originally written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, German and Russian. In over 700 pages, Rosin documents each community from its beginning until World War I, through the years of Independent Lithuania (1918-1940), and finally during the indescribable Nazi annihilation of nearly all of Lithuanian Jewry. Most impressive is the record of cultural richness, the important town personalities, the welfare institutions, the glorious Hebrew educational system of the Tarbuth elementary schools and the Yavneh high schools, the world famous Telz and Ponevezh Yeshivoth (in the towns of Telsiai and Panevezys), the Yiddish press and other significant events of the period. Rosin has provided a documentary and a testament to once vibrant communities almost totally destroyed but which come alive again in the pages of this book. 736 page, Hard Cover. List of towns included in the book: Alite Birzh Yurburg Koshedar Kopcheve Memel Naishtot Kibart Lazdey Ligum Mariampol Meretch Ponevezh Pikvishok Pren Shaki Salant Serey Shat Stoklishok Sudarg Tavrig Taragin Telzh Utyan Aran Vishey Vilkovishk Verzhbelov Zheiml Naishtot Tavrig 786 page, Hard Cover

"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences; fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults; periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video; educational and teaching materials; and information on organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors and vendors of Holocaust materials.

Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English, unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3) scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field; and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites), adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.