Pilot to crew. Bail out! Bail out!” On 19th October, 1944, 2/Lt Kenneth W. Simmons was forced to jump from the damaged B-24 aircraft while in a bombing raid over Germany. Once he landed he quickly became a ‘kriegie’, a prisoner of war, which he remained until General Patton’s men freed him in late April 1945. Much of these seven months of captivity were spent in the dismal conditions of the prison camp Stalag Luft II. Simmons provides fascinating insight into what life was like be an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, from undergoing interrogations to suffering cruelty and abuse from the guards. He records not only the mundane day to day life of the prisoners but also their private projects, from forging documents to using the latrine to dispose of waste material from their tunneling projects. “steadily interesting … due to the small details of everyday existence” Kirkus Reviews “The march of death … is one of the most impressive scenes to be portrayed of World War II.” Houston Chronicle “a story of hellish and holy experiences undergone by the men who became PW of the Nazis.” Daily Democrat Kenneth Simmons was an American airman with the 8th Air Force who was forced to bail out of his plane just north of Bad Kreuznach in Germany. His work Kreigie records his experiences as a prisoner of war and was first published in 1960. Simmons passed away in 1969.

    Her mother died from the same grenade, hugging her daughter's body in order to protect her. This book is Jaganjac's recollection of the events that happened soon after that.

    Millions were shoved into ghettos and forced to live under the swastika. Death camps were built and something called "Operation Reinhard" was set into motion. Its goal? To murder all the Jews of Poland.The Commandant of Lubizec is a harrowing account of a death camp that never actually existed but easily could have in the Nazi state. It is a sensitive, accurate retelling of a place that went about the business of genocide. Told as a historical account in a documentary style, it explores the atmosphere of a death camp. It describes what it was like to watch the trains roll in, and it probes into the mind of its commandant, Hans-Peter Guth. How could he murder thousands of people each day and then go home to laugh with his children? This is not only an unflinching portrayal of the machinery of the gas chambers, it is also the story of how prisoners burned the camp to the ground and fled into the woods. It is a story of rebellion and survival. It is a story of life amid death.With a strong eye towards the history of the Holocaust, The Commandant of Lubizec compels us to look at these extermination centers anew. It disquiets us with the knowledge that similar events actually took place in camps like Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The history of Lubizec, although a work of fiction, is a chillingly blunt distillation of real life events. It asks that we look again at "Operation Reinhard". It brings voice to the silenced. It demands that we bear witness.

    Asked about her experience during the war, Helga quietly revealed she had been a "Jugend," a member of Hitler's child army, "trained to revere and obey the Fuhrer." When Riehl asked how children were recruited, she replied, "Clever seduction." Helga's seduction begins with an invitation from Hitler she cannot refuse. The ten-year-old is ordered to attend weekly meetings of the Hitler Youth movement. Lies and tasty treats are employed to entice her allegiance to the Fuhrer. Helga is sent away to Hitler Youth training camps as the war draws nearer her home in Berlin. She is caught between loyalty to her family, suffering under Nazi rule, and loyalty to the Fuhrer, who keeps her safe and well-fed. Helga's gradual disillusionment, followed by her harrowing escape home, is a powerful coming-of-age story of a young girl's survival of Nazi mind control.

    EDITION. Set against the tumultuous background of apartheid South Africa, a powerful and moving debut about family, sacrifice, and discovering what it means to belong… Celia Mphephu knows her place in the world. A black servant working in the white suburbs of 1960s Johannesburg, she’s all too aware of her limitations. Nonetheless, she has found herself a comfortable corner: She has a job, can support her faraway family, and is raising her youngest child, Miriam. But as racial tensions explode, Celia’s world shifts. Her employers decide to flee the political turmoil and move to England—and they ask to adopt Miriam and take her with them. Devastated at the prospect of losing her only daughter, yet unable to deny her child a safer and more promising future, Celia agrees, forever defining both their futures. As Celia fights against the shattering violence of her time, Miriam battles the quiet racism of England, struggling to find her place in a land to which she doesn’t belong—until the call of her heritage inexorably draws her back to Africa to discover the truth behind her mother’s choices and uncover a heartbreaking secret from long ago…READERS GUIDE INSIDE

    Shortly afterwards Thomas began to write. This book is the result.Beginning on the day of Kadian's death, and continuing to the year anniversary, and beyond, Kadian Journal is a record of grief in its rawest form, and of a mind in shock and questioning a strange new reality. Interspersed within the journal are fragments of memory: jewel-bright everyday moments that slowly combine to form a biography of a lost son, and a lost life.It is an extraordinary document, and several things at once: a lucid, raw, and startlingly brave book: a powerful and moving account of a father's grief, and a beautiful tribute to an exceptional son.

    Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem.This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry—the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion.The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others.Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers.Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.

    Medallion. While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood. From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Gorlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Liberated at sixteen, he took on smuggling as a means to survive. It was not until the Bricha approached him and he became a lead operative - smuggling thousands of refugees across country borders - that he was finally able to begin his life again. Teddy's story is one of survival amidst horrific circumstances. The author does not sensationalize the suffering his grandfather and his family endured, but in this work of narrative nonfiction simply recreates this remarkable man's early life during one of the darkest moments of human history.

    The book chronicles Virski's experiences as a soldier in the Ukraine and Central Asia, describing the hardships, his comrades-in-arms, the food, clothing, and interactions with officers and the NKVD (secret police). When war with Germany breaks-out, Virski witnesses scenes of brutality and is caught in fierce fighting, where he is wounded and hospitalized. Following his recovery, he eventually makes his way back to his native Poland. My Life in the Red Army is impressive for its straightforward style yet tinged with a sense of humor towards his situation.

    She was an ordinary German schoolgirl from an average family thrust into the extraordinary circumstances of war. Her memoir vividly describes the price she, her family, and all the German people paid for Hitler's ambition. Relived through her memories, it is truly a story of childhood innocence lost, but also of survival through grit and courage. She endured air raids, bomb shelters, military training, capture, imprisonment, rape and harrowing escape. The author has created a razor-sharp, clear-eyed and tense narrative about her life during this frightening time, as well as the story of her early struggles as a German war bride settling into a new life in America. This is Dorchen, and she is a remarkable woman.

    . . what might have been numbing recitations of dogfights are instead vivid descriptions of life as a warrior during World War II.” Indeed, it is this unexpected perspective, brought to life by the authors’ neutrality and thoughtful research, that illuminates a side of war largely hidden from the American public: the experience of the German Luftwaffe pilot. In The German Aces Speak II, Heaton and Lewis paint a picture of the war through the eyes of four more of Germany’s most significant pilots—Johannes Steinhoff, Erich Alfred Hartmann, Guther Rall, and Dieter Hrabak—put together from numerous interviews personally conducted by Heaton from the 1980s through the 2000s. The four ex-Luftwaffe fighter aces bring the past to life as they tell their stories about the war, their battles, their off-duty lives, their lives after the war, and, perhaps most importantly, how they felt about serving under the Nazi leadership of Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. Together, the memories of the events captured in The German Aces Speak II continue one of today’s most unique World War II book series, unearthing a facet of the war that has gone widely overlooked for the American public.

    Kit Smallwood, hiding a painful secret and exhausted from nursing soldiers during the Second World War, escapes to Wickam Farm where her friend is setting up a charity sending midwives to the Moonstone Home in South India. Then Kit meets Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his medical training at Oxford. But Kit’s light-skinned mother is in fact Anglo-Indian with secrets of her own, and Anto is everything she does not want for her daughter. Despite the threat of estrangement, Kit is excited for the future, hungry for adventure, and deeply in love. She and Anto secretly marry and set off for South India—where Kit plans to run the maternity hospital she’s helped from afar. But Kit’s life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Anto’s large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. As their relationship begins to fray, Kit’s job becomes fraught with tension as they both face a newly independent India, where riots have left millions dead and there is deep-rooted suspicion of the English. In a rapidly changing world, Kit’s naiveté is to land her in a frightening and dangerous situation... Based on true accounts of European midwives in India, Monsoon Summer is a powerful story of secrets, the nature of home, the comforts and frustrations of family, and how far we’ll go to be with those we love.

    Populated by distant and little-known figures—Irish and French monks, saints, and scientists in Winter Mythologies; Benedictine monks in the Vendée region of France in Abbots—the tales frequently draw on obscure histories and other literary sources.Michon brings his characters to life in spare, evocative prose. Each, in his or her own way, exemplifies a power of belief that brings about an achievement—or catastrophe—in the real world: monasteries are built upon impossibly muddy wastes, monks acquire the power of speech, lives are taken, books are written, saints are created on the flimsiest of evidence. Michon’s exploration in ancient archives has led him to the discovery of such often deluded figures and their deeds, and his own exceptional powers bestow upon them a renewed life on the written page. This in turn is an example of the power of belief, which for Michon is what makes literature itself possible. Winter Mythologies and Abbots are meant to be read slowly, to be savored, to be mined for the secrets Michon has to tell.

    London Times war correspondent, George Adams, is a tortured soul, devastated by his wife's death and rejected by all branches of the military. Destroyed by events he couldn't control, he can't face the future and won't forget the past. His editor sends him to Singapore, a city threatened by the Japanese, hoping the exotic location and impending crisis will erase his haunting memories. Within minutes of his arrival, George is caught in a near-fatal air raid that triggers a chain of conflict and catastrophes. Injured and sheltered underground, he meets Thomas Montclair, a crafty French spy, and Lady Jane Carrington Smythe, an English aristocrat, who are destined to share his adventures. When a Japanese general is murdered, Lady Jane becomes the prime suspect. The trio flees the enemy and their own troubled pasts, confronting personal demons as well as the Japanese. They chase their dreams and elude their nightmares, evading a manhunt that spans the islands of the southwest Pacific, their lives wrapped in a swirling kaleidoscope of death, doubt, and desire.

    It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God’s role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.

    France, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries were all under occupation. Only Britain stood in the way of the complete triumph, and Hitler planned a two-pronged offensive—a blistering aerial bombardment followed by a land invasion—to subdue his final enemy. But for the first time in the war, Hitler did not prevail. As Leo McKinstry details in this fascinating new history, the British were far more ruthless and proficient than is usually recognized. The brilliance of the RAF in the Battle of Britain was not an exception but part of a pattern of magnificent organization that thwarted Hitler’s armies at every turn. Using a wealth of archival and primary source materials, Leo McKinstry provides a groundbreaking new assessment of the six fateful months in mid-1940 when Operation Sea Lion was all that stood between the Nazis and total victory.

    The underdogs had saved the war for the Allies. It was nothing short of miraculous.Corsi's analysis is based on a record of oral histories along with original field maps used by field commanders, battle orders, and other documentation made at the time of the military command. With a perspective gleaned from newspapers, periodicals, and newsreels of the day, Corsi paints a riveting portrait of one of the most important battles in world history.

    Eleven-year-old Mari grew up tucked under the wings of her parents, grandma, and older siblings. After Hitler's troops invade Norway in Spring 1940, she is forced to grow beyond her "little girl" nickname to deal with harsh new realities. At her side for support and protection is Odin, her faithful elkhound. As the year progresses, Mari, her family, and her neighbors are drawn into the activities of the Norwegian underground resistance. Readers will cheer for Mari as she develops her inner strength - and the courage to help celebrate Norway's spirit of resistance." - Kathleen Ernst, author of American Girl's Caroline Abbott series. "Beautifully written, emotionally taut novel of one girl's coming of age during war time." - Gayle Rosengren, What the Moon Said. Sandy Brehl is a teacher and member of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. She lives in Muskego, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee.

    As the war unfolds through his eyes, we are privileged to meet an inspirational soul of indomitable will, courage and compassion. At age 12 Kulski is recruited as a soldier in the clandestine Underground Army by his Boy Scout leader, and at age 13 enters the Warsaw Ghetto on a secret mission. Arrested by the Gestapo at age 14 and sentenced to Auschwitz, he is rescued and joins the commandos. At age 15, Kulski fights in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. He ends the war as a German POW, finally risking a dash for freedom onto an American truck instead of waiting for Soviet "liberation.

    Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world.Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide.As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.

    There, he saw things that no one should ever see, and did things he would give anything to forget. Decades later, he still can't speak of his past - or even reveal his identity to those closest to him.Now he's decided to put himself on trial for treason against his people. Approaching a local rabbi to serve as judge, he sets in motion a process that may let him rejoin the world of the living - if it doesn't destroy him first.Returning is a haunting and compelling exploration of the choices we make in a choiceless time, the terrifying strength and burden of the will to survive, and the power of the human spirit to transcend even its own destruction. It will leave you changed forever.

    Anna, a traumatised Jewish refugee, meets Sam, a British army officer in wartime Palestine.The novel spans 100 years of Anna's life; born in 1914 in a comfortable secular family in Vienna, her childhood is secure and protected until increasing anti-Semitism changes everything. A naive early affair causes a crisis. Anna escapes to Palestine carrying a secret buried deep within herself - one she cannot acknowledge for many years.When Anna and Sam meet, both are overwhelmed by unexpected love, but can they survive the challenges thrown up by their complex life together? Sam is posted to post-war Berlin and Anna must adjust to living in the land of the enemy. Her struggle results in psychological trauma, affecting her relationships with all those she loves. Will she succeed in overcoming the ghosts and secrets of her past and find some resolution?

    One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and as she wrote, she waited, desperately hoping her family would return.

    The ninth volume of Tove and Lars Jansson's classic comic strip features the beloved "Fuddler and Married Life" story. Together, the four stories in this collection display the poignancy, whimsy, and philosophical bent that constitute the Moomins' enduring appeal.

    The books are: - Finnegans Wake, a novel - Exiles, a theatrical play. Finnegans Wake, is significant for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before Joyce's death, it was his final work. The book is written in an idiosyncratic language, a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words. Some critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. The work contains expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandons all conventions of plot and character construction. Please be aware that this edition has no missing pages, or typos attributable to our edition. We are faithfully publishing what the author wrote, and how he wrote it!

    Well worth a look. Well worth a read.” —War History Online   Based on intelligence documents, personal testimonies, memoirs, and official histories, including material only declassified in 2010, Guarding Hitler provides the reader with a fascinating inside look at the secret world of Hitler’s security and domestic arrangements. The book focuses in particular on both the official and private life of Hitler during the latter part of the war, at the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, and Hitler’s private residence at Berchtesgaden, the Berghof.  Guarding Hitler manages to offer fresh insights into the life and routine of the Führer, and most importantly, the often indiscreet opinions, observations, and activities of the “little people” who surrounded Hitler but whose stories have been overshadowed by the great affairs of state.   It covers not only the plots against Hitler’s life but the way security developed as a result. His use of “doubles” is examined as is security while traveling by land or air.   As little has been written about the security and domestic life of Adolf Hitler, Guarding Hitler allows the reader to delve deeper into this previously overlooked aspect of the world’s most infamous man.   “A fascinating view into the close world Hitler inhabited and which shaped his life and decisions.” —Fire Reviews

    And now the government is actually helping the Nazis. Someone has got to do something, but it seems like no one has the guts—until Paquerette arrives.Smuggling refugee children is Paquerette’s job. And she asks Magali to help.Working with Paquerette is scary and exhausting, but Magali never doubts that it is the right thing to do. Until her brash actions put those she loves in danger.

    Clinging fiercely to his faith in God, the nineteen-year-old Unsdorfer faced the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald with courage and moral defiance, a testament to the abiding strength of the Jewish spirit.

    soldiers were taken from a German POW camp and transported by cattle car to Berga, slave-labor camp for European Jews. Inspired by this shocking and little-known event, K.J. McCall weaves fact and fiction in a story that begins in a small Pennsylvania town in September, 1941 when America is still at peace and much of the world is already at war. Corbin O’Connell is then just a high school senior, stuck on the family farm, snared by the conniving Velma, hopelessly in love with Daisy, his best friend’s girl. All he knows of the war is what he sees in newsreels. But everything changes on December 7, 1941, and 1942 finds him standing in line to register for the draft only two weeks after graduation. He’s headed for big trouble and doesn’t know it. To him the war is simply a convenient escape from his troubles and, blind to reality, he’s eager to enlist. But he will see. Far from home, he’s swept up in world conflict, and life veers off in its own mad direction when he’s captured by the Germans. Back then one had no choice in the matter, thrown into the war of all wars just by being born. There was no getting around it – not if you were Eighteen in 1942.

    Can he save his unit from a deadly attack by German machine-gun nests?Plucked off his sinking ship by a U-boat, Navy lieutenant Edouard Izak is sent to a POW camp deep in German territory. Can he engineer a daring escape? The soldiers of the all-African American Eighth Illinois face bitter racism and segregation. Can they overcome bigotry to fight with valor and distinction?These and other brave heroes risked their lives serving their country in World War I. You will never forget their courageous true stories.The Great War --The Tennessee crack shot: Army Corporal Alvin York --The flying fox: Royal Flying Corps Major William " Billy" Bishop --The "suicide club" hero: Army Private John "Jack" Barkley --The POW escapee: Navy Lieutenant Edouard Izac --The battlefield savior: Ambulance driver James "Jim" McConnell --The killer marksman: Army Lieutenant Samuel Woodfill --The ace of aces: United States Air Service Captain Eddie Rickenbacker --The immigrant doughboy: Army Private Abraham Krotoshinsky --The Fighting Eighth: The 8th Illinois National Guard/370th U.S. Army Infantry --The devil dog: Marine Gunner William Nice --WWW I glossary.

    As the Second World War unfolds Bruna's life remains largely the same. By 1943, her biggest disappointment is that food rationing means there is no cake to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. The Italian leader Mussolini's allegiance to Hitler and the distant reports of fighting seem far away from their lives. But when the Italian people turn against their fascist regime, war comes to their region. Bruna struggles to cope as Nazi soldiers descend to occupy their village, and she must help her mother and sisters stand up to the occupying soldiers. Her peaceful life is turned upside down by the fact that her beloved little village is now the centre of the final stage of fighting between the Allies and the Germans, the only front left defended by the Nazis in Italy.Including photographs and maps, War In My Town is a true story based on the experiences of author E. Graziani's mother and her family.

    Of the 33 who escaped death, only one person remains to describe these events--Betty Gold. Twelve-year-old Betty and her family hid inside a secret wall built by her father and, when it seemed safe, crept toward the forest, which became their home.In part one of Beyond Trochenbrod, Gold provides a brief history of Trochenbrod, the only all-Jewish town to exist outside of biblical Israel, and describes a series of cherished childhood experiences before the arrival of Soviet and, later, Nazi occupiers. Part two centers on the family's struggles against hunger, pain, despair, and the constant fear of being discovered while living in the forest. How the family survived against these and other threats is nothing short of miraculous. Their unlikely rescue, stay at a displaced persons camp, and journey to America are the subjects of part three. In the fourth and final part of her memoir, Gold recounts her difficult adjustment to her new home in Cleveland and discusses how her Trochenbrod experiences have transformed her life and the lives of others.Man's inhumanity is undeniable in Beyond Trochenbrod, but so is humanity's capacity to prevail in spite of unimaginable odds.

    Handsome, intelligent, and impetuous, he volunteered for the Waffen SS at an early age and dedicated his life to the Nazi cause. Peiper was Heinrich Himmler’s ever-present personal adjutant in the early years of the war-- an SS "everyman" witness to momentous events in Hitler's Third Reich. Once on the fighting front with the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Peiper became known for a flamboyant and brutal style of warfare.After the war, Peiper became the central subject in the bitterly disputed Malmédy war crimes trial, where he was condemned to death but ultimately released due to the efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and an Atlanta attorney Willis M. Everett, Jr. After moving to eastern France in 1972, he was harassed by the French Communists and died in a gun battle at his home on July 14, 1976–Bastille Day. His assassins were never identified.In Hitler's Warrior, historian Danny Parker highlights the fascinating personalities of Peiper’s story and raises questions on how an intelligent and capable soldier could decide to embrace the dark side of genocidal conflict. The rich narrative is bolstered by previously unseen archival sources as well as extensive interviews with German veterans, Belgian, Italian and French civilians, and even participants from the Malmédy trial at Dachau .This major new historical work helps us to fathom the world of Hitler’s Third Reich, a morally inverted world in which cruelty was good and kindness belied fatal weakness.

    As Allied armies close in on the retreating armies of the Third Reich, Captain Jim McFarlane, a Canadian infantry officer, is coming apart at the seams. He is exhausted and his identity fragments as he tries to command his combat company under fire, waiting with equally bated breath for letters from his wife Marianne and for orders to advance into the fray. Written in extraordinarily vivid prose, A Beckoning War is alternatively cerebral and visceral, unsettling and gripping, propelled by the tension between the larger perspective of the war and the private perspective of an officer teetering at the edge. This novel marks the debut of an important new author.

    These subversive tall tales and their colourful hero are the creation of Stepan Pisakhov (1879-1960), who lived his life in Arkhangelsk - a stone’s throw from the White Sea. Dmitry Trubin, from the same city, has illustrated the work; as an artist Trubin is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Blackwell Boyce, from Canada but a once-upon-a-time resident of Arkhangelsk, has rendered the tales for the first time into English - and confesses to tinkering with two or three of them along the way.For readers who believe that all Russian literature is dark and depressing - Senya Malina Tells It Like It Was is going to surprise.

    The story of the capture, imprisonment and survival of Gertrud Baltutt, a German civilian in East Prussia who was transported into forced labor in the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.

    

    As a teenager, Anastasia Saporito discovered that truth as she and her family found themselves exiled, vulnerable, and no longer able to call on their social standing and accumulated riches as the Soviet and German armies converged during World War II. Saporito recounts in vivid detail the difficulties of her childhood as the daughter of White Russian aristocrats forced to flee their native Russia for refuge in Yugoslavia. In Ancient Furies Saporito skillfully depicts her family, her own struggles as a girl coming of age in war-torn central Europe, and the devastation incurred as a result of Nazi actions toward civilian populations of occupied countries. Personal recollections form the basis of this memoir, but the trials and tribulations faced by this young woman shed light on the often-hidden experiences of the once-wealthy elite of central and eastern Europe as the Nazi war machine tore much of that region asunder. Through the words of her teenage self, Saporito brings a different civilian experience of World War II into the open.

    It is well-documented that prior to their publication many of the stories were told by Oscar Wilde at dinner parties, where he always commanded the stage, and that alone should indicate his intended audience was adults. The stories were originally published in two volumes, and when asked directly if such intricate stories in the second volume as "The Fisherman and His Soul" were intended for children, Wilde replied, "I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public." That disclaimer aside, there is much for adults to like in these deceptively simple tales, which only recently have begun to receive their due as serious literature.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. British Prisoners of War merely exchanged one barbed-wire battleground for another.In the camps the war was eternal. There was the war against the German military, fought with everything from taunting humour to outright sabotage, with a literal spanner put in the works of the factories and salt mines prisoners were forced to slave in. British PoWs also fought a valiant war against the conditions in which they were mired. They battled starvation, disease, Prussian cruelties, boredom, and their own inner demons. And, of course, they escaped. Then escaped again. No less than 29 officers at Holzminden camp in 1918 burrowed their way out via a tunnel (dug with a chisel and trowel) in the Great Escape of the Great War. It was war with heart-breaking consequences; more than 12,000 PoWs died, many of them murdered, to buried in shallow unmarked graves.Using contemporary records - from prisoners' diaries to letters home to poetry - John Lewis-Stempel reveals the death, life and, above all, the glory of Britain's warriors behind the wire. For it was in the PoW camps, far from the blasted trenches, that the true spirit of the Tommy was exemplified.

    It was self-published, written in a burst of creative energy over a three-month period during which Dan sometimes worked day and night. A small print run of 1,000 books resulted, and were quickly sold out. Despite its small scale and lack of promotion, Black Hole of Wauwilermoos has become a book that is widely admired and often quoted by World War Two scholars and historians, most recently in Donald Miller’s best-selling Masters of the Air. I have attempted to stay true to the book’s original premise and style. All I’ve done is tighten it up (it’s about half as long as the original). If, upon finishing, one is left wanting more, I recommend the original version of Black Hole, and Dan’s memoir of his childhood and young adulthood, The Circle of Thorns: Birth and Learning Years. Dan is a prolific and thoughtful writer of short stories, poems, and books, most of which he shares only with a few friends. Reading Dan’s collected works has allowed me to get to know a man who is at the core intensely guarded and private, a man who has been deeply impacted by his wartime experiences who carries with him a multitude of physical and emotional scars that will never heal. Despite his having lived through the banality and evil of war and imprisonment, despite being betrayed by his own government, he continues to courageously reach out to others. Given every reason to reject a loving God and a rational universe, he continues to be a spiritual man. We both hope you learn from the book and that it opens your eyes to a little-known story of World War Two.

    The war involved people from so many different backgrounds and countries and included here are, among others, British, German, Russian and Indian voices. Alongside testament from the many ordinary people whose lives were transformed by the events of 1914-18, there are extracts from names that have become synonymous with the war, such as Siegfried Sassoon and T.E. Lawrence. What unites them is a desire to express something of the horror, the loss, the confusion and the desire to help - or to protest. A Broken World is an original collection of personal and defining moments that offer an unprecedented insight into the Great War as it was experienced and as it was remembered.Edited by the bestselling author of Birdsong and Dr Hope Wolf, this is an original and illuminating non-fiction anthology of writing on the First World War.

    The answer most commonly quoted by SS men accused of atrocious crimes after Germany had surrendered in 1945. But who gave those orders? Who was the mastermind behind the sophisticated machinery which allowed men from normal family backgrounds to kill on such a scale? The right man at the right time, fate steered Heinrich Himmler to take control of an organization destined to carry out Hitler s racial policies. This study not only sets out in detail how Heinrich Himmler s daily routine allowed him to implement Nazi strategy, but it also provides illustrations of the man behind much of it, both at work and at home. Of all the personalities of history demonized by postwar writers, Heinrich Himmler ranks among the most reviled. His legacy is one of hatred, violence and cold blooded murder on a vast scale. A Jekyll and Hyde character, variously described by his generation and those who followed as charming, loyal, polite, a pedant, an eccentric, an organizational genius, a fool, a desk killer and a loving father. The camera allows us into his world, albeit temporarily, and we can equate his busy, but mostly mundane schedule with contemporary images frozen in time.REVIEWS "text as engaging as the illustrations, and highly recommend this marvelous book to all who think they've seen everything about Heinrich Himmler.Military Advisor"

    Every day a fight for survival. Terror has gripped the beautiful city of Amsterdam, following the Nazi invasion. With the help of the Dutch Resistance, desperate mother Cilla is forced to send her young son and nineteen month old baby daughter into separate hiding places. Cilla’s own years in hiding are shadowed by fear about her children. Are they alive? Will her daughter remember her and will she even want to come “home”? A gripping story of love and loss in a world of turmoil. Based on a secret, true story told for the first time after seventy years. “One day soon I will get you back and I will never let you go again. Never.” “This is the most compelling Holocaust story I think my students will ever read/” Vivan Kesenbaum, high school teacher, Boca Raton, Florida “I loved this book. It was so vividly told and I absolutely loved the ending.” Izzy Pactor, aged 11, London “It’s a really great book that taught me a lot about the war.” Joelle Deutsch, age 12, London