He waits with the German war machine for the order from Adolf Hitler to start the western Blitzkrieg--the "lightning war."Six hundred kilometers away, WWI veteran René Legrand plows his fields. He is enjoying the life he has made with his wife and two sons in the peaceful village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Since the end of the last war, he has tried to forget the atrocities he'd witnessed. Most of all, he has tried to forget the horrors he inflicted on others as the deadliest assassin the French Army has ever known, unaware he will soon need the skills of war he once used to perfection.His youngest son, Jean-Pierre, lives the life of a typical thirteen-year-old. He attends school, helps his father in the fields, and tries not to be nervous around the mesmerizing Angelique Lapierre. Events will soon force him to become a man, and along with his father, brother, and a small group of citizens, they harass their German occupiers and help the Allies prepare for the D-Day invasion.Guilty of nothing other than being a Jew, Jean-Pierre's best friend, Alfred Shapiro, flees to Spain with his family. They hope to make it through the treacherous Pyrenees Mountains before the Nazis capture them.Working with the French Resistance, Gabrielle Hall uses her beauty and cunning to obtain military intelligence from the Nazi officers who frequent her café.In Fort Benning, Georgia, Captain James Gavin discusses a plan with Major William Lee to begin the U.S. Army's first parachute brigade. Four years later, General "Jumpin' Jim" Gavin will descend through the night sky and into Normandy, France, along with the greatest invasion force the world has ever seen.These and others are the heroes of Sainte-Mère-Église.

     Poland 1944, Mjetek finds himself in Auschwitz after taking part in Zionist underground activities trying to fight against the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. He meets his brother and understands that their entire family has been massacred and that their days are numbered. Mjetek decides to not give up and says he is a blacksmith, though he has never worked with metal. At work in one of the factories, a melted piece of iron falls and burns him. He manages to go back to the camp and his brother takes care of him, selling his golden tooth for medical supplies. Staying in the “clinic” was supposed to be the end of Mjetek but this is actually what saves him. When his brother is marched to his death and they have to say their final goodbye. Mjetek’s story of survival is marked with small miracles, determination and unbelievable bravery. This memoir will leave you breathless and heartbroken, yet, inspired.

    Abram and Julia Bobrow escaped from the Nazi death squads and fled to the vast forests of Byelorussia where they learned to survive with little food, shelter or warm clothing. Finally adapting to the severe conditions, they began to do little things like cutting telephone wires or tearing up railroad tracks. Still, they were never more than one step ahead of the SS and their auxiliaries—units bent on destroying the partisan movement and ridding Europe of its Jewish population. Most partisan groups were made up of Soviet soldiers and they wouldn't accept anyone who didn't have their own weapons. Julia was lucky and was accepted to a Russian group as a nurse; Abram’s group consisted of himself, his brother Label and his father. They had a sawed-off rifle and one pistol with six bullets. Abram and Label used their first two bullets to kill two peasants that had turned in their aunt and her children for blood money. The story is told in Abram's own words.

    Will Sarah’s strong will and determination be enough for her to survive when everything she loves is taken from her? Part memoir, part fiction, What She Lost is the reimagined true-life story of the author’s grandmother growing into a woman amid the anguish of the Holocaust. It is a tale of resilience, of rebuilding a life, and of rediscovering love. About the Author Melissa W. Hunter is an author and blogger from Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied creative writing and journalism at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a BA in English literature and a minor in Judaic studies. She received the English Department’s Undergraduate Essay Award and Undergraduate Fiction Award over two consecutive years. In her senior year, she received a grant to study and write about the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Her articles have been published on Kveller.com and LiteraryMama.com, and her short stories have appeared in the Jewish Literary Journal. She is a contributing blogger to the Today Show parenting community, and her novella Through a Mirror Clear was published as a serial installment on TheSame.blog, an online literary journal written for women by women. Her novel What She Lost is inspired by her grandmother’s life as a Holocaust survivor. When not writing, Melissa loves spending family time with her husband and two beautiful daughters.

    Max is a British Territorial soldier and Zia is a Jewess from the south of France. Zia's grandmother is a wealthy socialite who owns a painting that could embarrass the Nazis. Zia is kidnapped by the Gestapo and Max is hospitalised on the same day. He awakes to find no trace of his beloved who he had planned to marry in England. The Red Cross reported that it was almost certain that Zia was trafficked across the border and delivered to Sachsenhausen Labour Camp at Oranienburg, not far from Berlin on the night of May 26th, 1939. A criminal act, regardless of the forthcoming war. The first warring Germans to step over the border onto French soil did not do so until May 13th, 1940. The Gestapo had kidnapped her 343 days before they attacked France.June 6th, 1944 - four years later, Max is one of 150,000 Allied troops headed towards the Normandy beaches. He has two options - find the woman he could never forget or kill the people responsible for her death. From the very beginning, Berlin had ordered SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Baumann to deal harshly with their VIP captive but never to kill her. Through three concentration camps, ending in Auschwitz, Zia wishes she had been killed many times over. Traumatized, she has no idea that Max and a few unlikely friends are battling their way through Nazi occupied Europe in a crazy attempt to rescue her. Berlin tries one last ploy to get their hands on her grandmother's painting. Zia's life hangs in the balance when Max meets his own personal nemesis in the guise of an undercover Gestapo officer. This novel explores the dark depths that humans can sink to in times of war. It is for adults only and even then; it is not for readers of a sensitive disposition. Whatever you read in this novel of extraordinary graphic Holocaust content, consider this – it was immeasurably worse, a hundred thousand times so.

    When she wins a coveted overseas post with the Red Cross, she focuses on her war service. Falling hard for a sexy pilot wasn't part of her plan. Jack Nielsen has a mission. Motivated by patriotic duty and desire to avenge the death of his best friend, Jack commands a ten-man B-17 crew. Keeping himself and his men alive in the fire-filled skies over Europe will require Jack's full focus. Romancing a headstrong Red Cross Girl is a distraction he knows he shouldn't indulge. While Vivian's work takes her across France and into the heart of Nazi Germany, mounting casualties drive Jack to confront his dwindling odds of survival. As Allied forces converge on all fronts, can Vivian and Jack's relationship withstand an excruciating battle between love and duty?Courage to be Counted is the first book in the Clubmobile Girls series of thrilling historical romances. If you like brave military heroes, trailblazing heroines, and romance under fire, then you'll love Eleri Grace's page-turning tale. Buy Courage to be Counted and soar into this historical romance today!

    Antony Coulthard was the privately educated son of wealthy parents with a degree in modern languages from Oxford. Fred Foster, the son of a bricklayer, had left school at 14. This mismatched young pair hatched a plan to disguise themselves and simply walk out of the camp, board a train, and head straight into the heart of Nazi Germany. This audacious plan involved 18 months of undercover work, including Antony spending 3 hours each evening teaching Fred German. They set off for the Swiss border via Germany, but when they reached the border town of Lake Constance, with Switzerland within their reach, Antony crossed over into freedom, while Fred’s luck ran out. What happened to them both next is both heartbreaking and inspiring.

    Having survived the retreat to and evacuation from Dunkirk, he volunteered for the newly formed Commandos and took part in their first operation, the raid on the Lofoten Islands. He fought and was captured in Tunisia. He went on the run before his POW camp at Fontanellato was taken over by the Nazis after the September 1943 Italian armistice. He spent six months on the run in the Apennine mountains aided by brave and selfless Italians. Many of whom were actively fighting their occupiers. He eventually reached Allied lines but not before several of his companions were tragically killed by both German and American fire.On return to England he immediately signed up for the invasion of North West Europe and despite being wounded eventually fought through to Germany.It is thanks to his son's research that Major Young's story can now be told. It is an inspiring and thrilling account which demands to be read.

    Risa was shipped together with many other Jews to the Oradea Ghetto and from there to the Plaszow Labor Camp and later to the Ober-Altstadt Labor camp. And even this was not enough… Risa was sent to the Auschwitz Death Camp to be slaughtered! But, she survived!Having survived, she met her husband – Mordechai Tzvi and they created a family which included 4 sons, 22 grandkids and 34 great-grandkids!Had anyone told Risa Shtauber during 1944-1945 that she would celebrate her 90th birthday in Israel surrounded by her sons, grandkids and great-grandkids, she would tell them to stop fantasizing.But in 2016, this came to be!And today, at the age of 94 and living her life in Israel, she still feels victorious when remembering those horrible years!

    Mitcham Jr. gets to the heart of the mysterious  figure respected and even admired by the people of the Allied nations he fought against. Mitcham recounts Rommel’s improbable and meteoric military career, his epic battles in North Africa, and his fraught relationship with Hitler and the Nazi Party. Desert Fox: The Storied Military Career of Erwin Rommel reveals: • How Rommel’s victories in North Africa were sabotaged by Hitler’s incompetent interference • How Rommel burned orders telling him to commit war crimes • Why it wouldn’t have helped Patton if he really had read Rommel’s book • How Rommel was responsible for the Germans’ defense against the D-Day landing • Why the plot to overthrow Hitler was fatally compromised when Rommel was gravely injured in an Allied attack • The reason Rommel agreed to commit suicide after his part in the plot was discovered by Hitler  Mitcham’s gripping account of Rommel’s life takes you through the amazing adventure of the World War II battles in North Africa. Again and again, Rommel outfoxed the Allies—until the war of attrition and Hitler’s blunders doomed the Axis cause. Illustrated with dozens of historical photos, this illuminating biography paints a fascinating and tragic picture of the man known as the Desert Fox.

    Will they all survive? As WW II breaks out, a father finds himself in the U.S. while his wife and sons are home in occupied Norway. Based on the son’s true-life journals from 1935-1945, this is the story of a family separated by war and uncertainty.

    Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After spending years running and eventually hiding alone, she was smuggled into Switzerland. Deprived of schooling, Edith worked at various jobs until the end of the war when she was able to rejoin her mother, who had managed to survive in France.After the war, the truth about the death camps and the mass murder on an industrial scale became fully known. Edith faced the trauma of Germany's depravity, the murder of her father and older brother in Auschwitz, her mother's irrational behavior, and the extreme poverty of the postwar years. She had to make a living but also desperately wanted to catch up on her education. What followed were seven years of struggle, intense study, and hard work until finally, against considerable odds, Edith earned the Baccalaur�at in 1949 and the Licence �s Lettres from the University of Toulouse in 1952 before coming to the United States. In America, Edith started at the bottom like all immigrants and eventually became a professor and later a financial advisor and broker. Since her retirement, Edith dedicates her time to publicly speaking about her experiences and the lessons from her life.

    Covering their entire lives, weaving in first person ‘real time’ voices as if watching a documentary about themselves, the unique structure of No Past Tense provides a distinctive ‘whole life’ view of the Holocaust. The book begins with their childhoods, education in Budapest, and 16-year-old Kati meeting 19-year-old Willi in the Jewish ghetto in Plesivec, a Slovak village annexed by Hungary in 1938. After liberation from the camps they returned to discover most Jews were gone, and the villagers did not want them back. In defiance, Kati took up residence in a shed on her family’s property, and in reclaiming what was hers, won Willi’s heart. They lived as smugglers in post-war Europe until immigrating illegally to Palestine in 1946. Describing Palestine, they talk frankly about rarely addressed issues such as prejudice against ‘newcomers’ from other Jews. Willi built tanks for the Haganah, the underground Jewish army, and supported the War of Independence but refused to move into homes abandoned by Palestinian Arabs. After discharge from the Israeli Air Force, Willi founded the country’s first rubber factory and headed the association of Israeli manufacturers at only 28. In 1958, saying he did not want the children to know war, Willi convinced Kati to move to America. He did not tell her that punitive tax fines, imposed when the government needed money due to the crisis in the Sinai, shook his faith in Israel. Once in America, after a few bad investments, Willi lost all their money and for the first time Kati suffered panic attacks. But Willi rebuilt his fortune, while Kati rediscovered her courage, and started living again.

    

    A village matriarch tries to hold her family together...Her grieving son finds a new life in the Cretan Resistance...A naive English soldier unwillingly finds the warrior in himself...And a fanatical German paratrooper is forced to question everything he thought he believed in. The lives of four ordinary people are irrevocably entwined and their destinies changed forever as each of them confronts the horrors of war and its echoes down the decades.

    From his recruitment into the military at Camp Grant to his training with the 501st Paratroop Infantry Regiment at Camp Toccoa, it wasn't until D-Day itself that he first arrived in England to join the 508th PIR. Nannini records Gene's memories of being dropped during Operation Market Garden in Nijmegen, Holland. Gene was listed as KIA and left for dead by his patrol, who presumed the worst when they saw his injuries from a shell explosion.In the climax of the story, Gene is captured by German SS soldiers and, with absolutely no protection, found himself standing before a senior officer, whom Gene recognised as Heinrich Himmler himself, behind enemy lines in a 16th century castle. Gene's subsequent interrogation is fully recounted, from the questioning of his mission to the bizarre appearance of sausages, mustard, marmalade and bread for his "dinner." This would be his last proper meal for two years.The rest of his story is equally gripping, as he became a POW held outside Munich, being moved between various camps ridden with disease and a severely undernourished population. Eventually, after several attempts at escape and several re-captures, his camp was liberated by American troops in April 1945.Gene's story is both remarkable for his highly unusual encounter, and his subsequent experiences.

     Now, twenty years later, Helen is a world-class swimmer, and a medal favorite for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, yet politically naive as the American team arrives in a racially charged, vainglorious Germany, where the Nazi regime is all too happy to use the young woman for political purposes. Caught up in the charismatic approaches of a member of the German press, Helen ignores the warnings of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a fellow swimmer and Italian American who has personal experience with fascism. She promises herself that once the gold medal is hers, she will speak her mind on the matter of peace between the two great countries. And then, on the eve of her gold medal swim, a chance meeting with an old mentor opens her eyes to the truth, that she is being used as a tool of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, who vows to ruin her if she doesn’t accept tainted assistance and in return, make a public gesture in support of the regime.

    After the census in Holland, the Nazis used the census to murder 75 percent of the Dutch Jews. After the census in France, the Nazis used the census to murder 25 percent of the country’s Jews. What made France different?At Vichy France’s National Statistical Service headquarters in Lyon, General René Carmille and his aide Miriam Dupré know spies are everywhere. They race against time to sabotage the census-based lists of Jews and mobilize the Resistance to combat the Nazi death machine. In this novel, Miriam tells the true story of General René Carmille’s leadership in saving the lives of thousands of Jews—the story of A Quiet Hero.

    It was the only organized, large-scale domestic escape by foreign prisoners in U.S. history. Painstakingly wrung from contemporary newspaper articles, interviews and first-person accounts from escapees and the law enforcement officers who pursued them, The Great Desert Escape brings history alive. From 1942 to 1946, the United States swarmed with captured enemy troops. Nearly 400,000 German soldiers and officers were held in more than 500 POW camps throughout the country. One such camp was the U.S. Army's prisoner of war camp at Papago Park just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, where on December 23, 1944 25 German Kreigsmariners tunneled free, determined to reach Mexico and find sympathizers who would get the back to the Fatherland. For the prisoners, life was at the best of times uneasy. On the outside of their prison fences were Americans who wanted nothing more than to see them die slow deaths for their perceived roles in killing their fathers and brothers in Europe. Many of these stranded German prisoners had heard rumors of castrations and worse for those who had escaped. On the inside were on occasion rabid Nazis determined to get home and continue the fight. At Papago Park in March of 1944, a newly-arrived prisoner who was believed (correctly) to have divulged classified information to the Americans was murdered--hung in one of the barracks by seven of his fellow prisoners. The Great Desert Escape sheds new light on the little known chapter in World War II history. Papago Park housed nearly 4000 German POWs, most of whom were U-boat crewmen. Until the arrival of a new American commander, it had been a very inefficient and haphazard operation. Author Keith Warren Lloyd describes the culture of complacency that had developed among the guards and their officers. Before the Great Desert Escape, several other attempts had been made. As a dramatic backdrop to the main narrative, Lloyd describes the life of one of the escapees: his service as an officer aboard a U-boat, his final patrol where his U-boat is sunk, his capture and interrogation, his arrival at Papago Park and finally his involvement in the escape. In September 1944 the senior POW officer, J�rgen Wattenberg, directed that tunnel should be dug from the bathhouse to the Arizona Crosscut Canal, which ran along the northern edge of the camp. The prisoners obtained digging tools from the guards, telling them that they wished to construct a volleyball court. They would go into the bathhouse at night to work on the tunnel. The soil around Papago Park was extremely hard and full of rocks, so the guards never expected them to be digging. The tunnel, six feet deep and 178 feet long, was completed in December of 1944. The plan was to escape to Mexico and locate people sympathetic to Germany (the reasons for their sympathy will also be described) who would arrange passage for them back to the Fatherland. Three of the escapees had built a collapsible raft and planned to float the Salt River to the Colorado and then to the Gulf of California, having seen the Salt River on a stolen map. They didn't know that one could step easily across the Salt River at that time of year. Discouraged, the 25 prisoners scattered. The Great Desert Escape recounts the flight of the prisoners. One U-boat officer found himself sitting at a lunch counter next to a suspicious Phoenix Police officer. Another asked for directions from a street cleaning crew, his accent betraying him. The cold and rainy weather caused several of the escapees (who by then had been acclimated to the desert) to turn themselves in. Still others lived like coyotes among the rocks and caves overlooking Papago Park before being rounded up. All of the escapees were eventually re-captured within six weeks. The book will then describe the inquiries and investigations by the army and the FBI in the aftermath of the escape. It is an ideal addition to Lyons rich military history list, including The Long Walk, which has sold more than 300,000 copies.

    The book first provides a nostalgic of Izaak's prewar life and goes on to detail how his family and community were gradually torn asunder by the Nazi occupation. During the war, Izaak was variously imprisoned in ghettos, work camps, and notorious concentration camps, all the while enduring and witnessing horrific cruelty all around him. Each step of his grueling six year journey is carefully remembered and documented in this transfixing memoir. Despite the magnitude of what Izaak faced, he was able to survive in body and spirit. Preserving the seed of religious life planted by his family and community, he was able to rebuild his entire world.

    During the Holocaust, Irene Oore’s mother escaped the death camps by concealing her Jewish identity. Those years found her constantly on the run and on the verge of starvation, living a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep herself and her family alive.Throughout the memoir, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now, she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive.

    Britain faces German invasion. A race is on to wreck Hitler's plans led by RAF Bomber Command's No. 5 Group, commanded by the famous 'Bomber' Harris. Two aqueducts, huge water bridges on the Dortmund-Ems Canal, along which the Germans are bringing invasion barges and supplies to the Channel coast, are identified as crucial to stopping Hitler. Can they be destroyed? A motley collection of daredevil British and Australian airmen are ordered to try, including Guy Gibson of later Dambusters fame. They are in a race against time, for every day that the aqueducts remain standing, the Germans gather to invade. At the same time, the British race to develop a new kind of bomb that can be dropped on the aqueducts, and scientists face almost insurmountable technical and obstacles. By mid-August 1940 eleven aircrews, flying old, slow and poorly armed Hampden bombers, have completed training for the raid. On the night of 12 August they launch from Lincolnshire, split into an attacking and diversionary force. They face desperate odds against a huge concentration of German flak guns, enemy night fighters and searchlights, and must fly suicidally low, slow and level to release the new bombs. In a raid with many similarities in personnel, target and weapon to the much more famous Dambusters Raid of 1943, the plucky band of outnumbered and outgunned airmen press home their assault on the aqueducts. If they fail, the Germans will probably be landing on the coast of southern England within a few weeks, but if they succeed, they may change the course of history and help to save their country from invasion and occupation. This is the untold and completely forgotten story of 'The Bridge Busters', the first Dambusters and their suicide mission just before the Battle of Britain began.

    Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system—political, ethical, metaphysical—strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, reunite over the bier of their dead father, a celebrated lawyer, both siblings are electrified. They are, for one thing, almost each other’s spitting image, while Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more resistant to any kind of status quo than her brother. Engaging in a series of ever more intense and questioning “holy conversations,” brother and sister progressively enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, and identity, seeking to arrive at a new conception of reality that they are sure lies within each other to discover.Musil’s Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking adventures of twentieth-century fiction, while Joel Agee’s new English translation captures all the nuance of Musil’s famously acute and penetrating style.

    Robert's story is a harrowing journey of peril and intrigue. Swept along by the inescapable currents of World War II, Robert confronts evil and persists in this riveting tale of resistance, survival, and journey to freedom, and ultimately love.

    Together with Per Bergsland another Norwegian POW he stowed away on a ship to Gothenburg Sweden. The escapees sought out the British consulate and were flown from Stockholm to Scotland. From there they were sent by train to London and shortly afterwards to 'Little Norway' in Canada. Muller's book about his wartime experiences was first published in Norwegian in 1946 titled Tre kom Tilbake (Three Came Back). This new edition is the first translation into English and will correct the impression--set by the film--that the men who escaped successfully were American and Australian. In a vivid informative memoir he details what life in the camp was like how the escapes were planned and executed and tells the story of his personal breakout and success reaching RAF Leuchars in Scotland.

    In 1938 Germany, these everyday activities were dangerous for Jews. Jutta and her family tried to lead normal lives, but soon they knew they had to escape--if they could, before it was too late.Throughout 1938, Jutta had her friends and relatives fill her poesiealbum--her autograph book-with inscriptions. Her daughter, Debbie Levy, used these entries as a springboard for telling the story of the Salzberg family's last year in Germany. This powerful story shows a world of change and chance, confusion and cruelty. It was a year of goodbyes.

    Yet many Americans remained largely indifferent as he turned his dangerous ambitions abroad. Not William Bailey. Just days after violent anti-Semitic riots had broken out in Berlin, the SS Bremen, the flagship of Hitler's commercial armada, was welcomed into New York Harbor. Bailey led a small group that slipped past security and cut down the Nazi flag from the boat in the middle of a lavish party. A brawl ensued, followed by a media circus and a trial, in which Bailey and his team were stunningly acquitted. The political victory ultimately exposed Hitler's narcissism and violent aggression for all of America to see.The Agitator is the captivating story of Bailey's courage and vision in the Bremen incident, the pinnacle of a life spent battling against fascism. Bailey's story is full of drama and heart--and it's an inspiration to anyone who seeks to resist tyranny.

    Grace harbors a secret, one which she fears might change the nature of their relationship forever. Unsure of how he will respond, she has decided to tell him upon his return knowing that to do so risks losing him forever. Seven hundred miles away in Berlin, war-weary firefighter Karl is haunted by the images he’s seen both on the home front and in Russia. Now he takes command of a group of teenage auxiliaries who find themselves on the front lines of Germany’s defenses against a nightly rain of fire. On a call, he meets Ursula, a young woman who lives near his station. Karl quickly finds himself falling for her, unaware that she is playing a dangerous game, one which might place his own life in danger. As the raid unfolds, they face choices which will forever change them, and those they love.

    Some names will remain, however, indelibly printed in the records and the memories of future generations. Adolf Hitler's political protestations against certain sections of twentieth-century European society developed into national policy once he achieved his grip on power. His vision of a Europe free of these `undesirables' almost became a reality. In Heinrich Himmler, he had a loyal servant, only too willing to sell his soul to the Devil to please his master. Himmler's SS organisation was the ideal tool to execute Hitler's plans, and what better administrator than the intelligent and obedient ex-naval officer who directed the Reich security police? From an early age, Reinhard Heydrich was determined to succeed at every challenge he encountered. An ambitious sportsman, a loving family man, and a ruthless executive, Heydrich possessed all the qualities necessary to carry out Hitler's policy in Himmler's name. This book illustrates the life of the architect of genocide, his background, his upbringing, his family, and his career, which developed into engineering one of the greatest crimes in history.

    One survivor is a seven-year-old girl. Lyuba is forced from her home into a Nazi ghetto, then spirited away, into hiding, for nearly two years -- on a farm, in haystacks.Under the hay Lyuba discovers the will to persevere, to survive. Even as her eyes open to the moral failings of her Ukrainian neighbors, she takes heart in the kindness of the Ukrainian farmer who is hiding her at great risk to himself and his family. She's encouraged, too, by thoughts of reunion with her older sister, Hanna, who is in hiding in town. But it's her uncommon bond with the farmer's dog, Brisko, that helps Lyuba through her greatest moments of peril, and despair.For Lyuba the dog becomes not just a guardian, but a guardian angel.The real Lyuba -- now living under a different name in the United States -- tells her own story in "The Girl in the Haystack," weaving a vivid, suspenseful narrative that addresses simply the complex matters of culture and ethnicity, trust and distrust, courage and cowardice. It is a story that has waited more than seventy years to be told.

    It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans--Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic--who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue other endangered political refugees, including Otto, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. As revealed in recently declassified records, Eva and Otto later engaged in different secret assignments with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in support of the Allied war effort. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Eva and Otto gave each other hope and strength as they acted upon what they understood to be an ethical duty to help others threatened by fascism. The book provides a sobering insight into the personal risks and costs of a commitment to that duty. Their unusually beautiful writing--directed to each other in diaries and correspondence during two long periods of wartime separation--also reveals an unlikely and inspiring love story.

    At seven years old, she and her parents are forced from their home into a ghetto, and one day, her mother is gone. As Anita’s father desperately tries to save his beloved daughter, he befriends a Catholic man who smuggles Anita out of the ghetto, risking his own life to save hers. Frightened, living among strangers and missing the warmth her parents provided, Anita learns how to be Catholic and spends most of her days inside and in silence. Always at risk of being discovered, Anita has only her newfound faith to accompany her on the lonely path of survival. After the war, orphaned and struggling with her identity, Anita finds her way through her grief and confusion to fulfill her father’s last request to Always Remember Who You Are.

    Mary Miller has reclaimed the life of a woman who embodied the best of Scotland and the finest values of her faith - and done her proud' - Sally MagnussonJane Haining was undoubtedly one of Scotland’s heroines.A farmer’s daughter from Galloway in south-west Scotland, Jane was a Church of Scotland missionary, and went to the Scottish Jewish Mission School in Budapest in 1932, where she worked as a boarding school matron in charge of around 50 orphan girls. The school had 400 pupils, most of them Jewish. Jane was back in the UK on holiday when war broke out in 1939, but she immediately went back to Hungary to do all she could to protect the children at the school. She refused to leave in 1940, and again ignored orders to flee the country in March 1944 when Hungary was invaded by the Nazis. She remained with her pupils, writing 'if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness’.” Her brave persistence led to her arrest in by the Gestapo in April 1944, for "offences" that included spying, working with Jews and listening to the BBC. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz just a few months later, at the age of 47. Her courage and self-sacrifice, her choice to stay and to protect the children in her care, has made her an inspiration to many.

    A family man who ran afoul of the Nazis, Josef Jakobs was ill-prepared for an espionage mission to England. Captured by the Home Guard after breaking his ankle, Josef was interrogated at Camp 020. Rejected as a double-agent, he was then prosecuted under the Treachery Act and executed by firing squad on 15 August 1941. It would seem to be an open and shut case, yet Josef’s MI5 file suggests otherwise. Faced with the threat of a German invasion in 1940-41, MI5 used promises and threats to break enemy agents, extract valuable intelligence and occasionally turn them into double agents. Evidence in his file suggests that the German Intelligence Service set Josef up to fail; sacrificed as a 'canary in the coal mine' to test MI5’s double-cross system. The Spy in the Tower tells the untold story of one of Nazi Germany’s failed agents. It calls into question the legality of Britain’s wartime espionage trials and the success of its double-cross system.

    In working through these various materials documenting the life of her father, Oswald “Valdik” Holzer, she learned of her family history through his remarkable experiences of exile and loss, resilience and hope. In this posthumous memoir, Schirm elegantly re-creates her father’s youthful voice as he comes of age as a Jew in interwar Prague, escapes from a Nazi-held army unit, practices medicine in China’s war-ravaged interior, and settles in the United States to start a family. Introducing us to a diverse cast of characters ranging from the humorous to the menacing, Holzer’s life story is an inspirational account of survival during wartime, a cinematic epic spanning multiple continents, and ultimately a tale with a twist—a book that will move readers for generations to come.  Purchase the audio edition.

    Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists—and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as “a civilization responding to its own destruction,” these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.

    

    What was their role within its administration, the concentration camps, and the Luftwaffe and militia units and how did it evolve in the way it did?We hear from women who issued typewritten dictates from above through to those who operated telephones, radar systems, fought fires as the cities burned around them, drove concentration camp inmates to their deaths like cattle, fired Anti-Aircraft guns at Allied aircraft and entered the militias when faced with the impending destruction of what should have been a one thousand-year Reich.Every testimony is unique, each person a victim of circumstance entwined within the thorns of an ideological obligation. In an interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary, she remembers: 'There was so much hatred within it's hard to understand how the state functioned...I am convinced all this infighting and competition from the males in Hitler's circle was highly detrimental to its downfall'.Women of the Third Reich provides an intriguing, humorous, brutal, shocking and unrelenting narrative journey into the half lights of the hell of human consciousness - sometimes at its worst.

    Von Ribbentrop was an often isolated figure among the Nazi elite. In his final report from London von Ribbentrop informed Hitler that he was convinced that Great Britain would fight for its position in the world. He went on to play a key role forging the short-lived pact with Stalin's Soviet Union.Far from being uncritical, the author, now in his 90s, sets out to paint an objective picture of his father's role. His unique position throws fascinating light on the unfolding dramatic events leading up to, and then the execution of, the Second World war. While the author briefly describes his personal experiences including his war service with the SS, it is the insight this work provides into top level decision making at the heart of the Third Reich that will appeal most to both historians and laymen.

    

    Karl Borch is a senior SS officer, who is promoted to commandant of Pullhausen concentration camp. Karl’s brief as an eugenics physician, is to create an Aryan master race by eradicating genetic defects from society and physically enhancing humans through experimentation and surgical procedure, while maintaining a holiday camp atmosphere for Nazi party propaganda. This eugenics directive has come straight from Heinrich Himmler himself.As the war progresses, his son and daughter learn more about the atrocities taking place in the Jewish ghettoes and concentration camps of Poland and Germany. Magda, Karl’s daughter, takes her own stand, making dreadful sacrifices. When the war is finally over and the camps are liberated, Karl and his fellow SS officers including Greta Binz’ the evil female camp guard, learn what it is like to be the persecuted hunted ones.The story opens with two teenage girls from very different families, recruited as eager ambitious conscripts into the Hitler Youth. In the first chapter, it is 1930. Greta Binz is from abusive, God-fearing parents, who despise Hitler’s ideology. Greta, taking exception to their criticism of the Fuhrer, and their scoffing at her pride for being awarded the “Medal of Purity” - given to racially pure members of the girls Hitler Youth, shows her brutality by faking an accident and burning her parents to death. Eight years later, 14-year-old Magda Borch, on the other hand, is caring and sensitive, from a well-to-do SS family. Whilst Karl’s wife, Frieda, goes along with it all under sufferance, and in secret has Jew friends. Magda’s 11-year-old brother, Martin, is also a keen Hitler Youth conscript. At school, Magda is also being presented with the “Medal of Purity”, for providing the purest Aryan family tree during lessons in class. “The Medal of Purity” shows how decent German families can slip into a way of life that feels good at the cost of slave labour, and how ordinary people can get caught up in the frenzy of National Socialism, no matter the cost, as the Borch family find out.

    She says good-bye to her husband that fateful morning not knowing that she is expecting their first child, or that she will never see him again.While imprisoned at the camp, she meets Helene Dvorak and other extraordinary women who risk their lives to save her and her baby from the brutality and unimaginable cruelty surrounding them. The women bond together to form friendships and lasting ties that endure through the horrors of the holocaust and long after liberation. From the hell of Ravensbruck to Montreal and Savanah, A Thousand Mothers tells the story of the resilient spirit of women and the astounding power of loyalty, courage, and love during the darkest days of the twentieth century.

    Imagine it 1944 and a prisoner uprising at that terrible place, the rebels blowing up one crematorium, damaging another, and killing many of their SS masters. Imagine it Jews leading this revolt, a people those same SS thought incapable of fighting. Now imagine one of these leaders a 22-year-old girl, arguably the greatest Jewish heroine to come out of the Holocaust. Finally, imagine her and three other young female inmates arrested by the Gestapo during the investigation that followed the rebellion and savagely tortured for weeks without giving up a single fellow conspirator. Imagine all that and more and you have The Trumpets of Jericho, the only novel ever to tell this extraordinary, true-life story of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in its entirety. It has everything you could ask of historical fiction: intensive research, action and adventure, heart-wrenching emotion, heroes and villains brought to life with a vividness straight history can't touch. Its main character, Roza Robota, exists to this day as an example of female empowerment at its gutsiest. No one in the book is more courageous than she. Most readers will have never heard of this remarkable girl barely out of her teens, but after Trumpets, it's just as likely none will forget her. The same can be said of the other heroic men and women who inhabit its pages, in which there are as many of the latter as the former. Indeed, without its contingent of female conspirators, the revolt of the Sonderkommando (those Jewish wretches forced to work the gas chambers and ovens) could not have happened, at least not the way it did. With so star-studded a distaff cast, Trumpets bears resemblance to Kelley's WWII novel Lilac Girls. Devoted as it is to Jews fighting back, it also mirrors Uris's towering saga of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mila 18. The sheer horror and certain thematic elements of Wiesel's iconic Night can be seen in it as well, even a feel-good ending to rival that of Schindler's List. In comparison to noted movies about the Holocaust, it rates as moving as the latter, as horrific as Son of Saul, as heroic as The Grey Zone, as personal as The Pianist. In short, the award-winning novelist and historian J. Michael Dolan has produced a sweeping epic of a work that he believes will stir you as deeply as its subject has him. In conjunction with resurrecting this fascinating slice of history, he explores, among other themes, religion and the existence of God, the psychology of genocide, friendship and romantic love, sexual and other pathologies, the nature of good and evil, right and wrong. Above all, he shows how the most monstrous crime ever committed was in the end no match for the indomitability, the grandeur of the human spirit. Silver Medalist in the Military/Wartime fiction category of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards, or "Ippy's." Silver Medalist in the War and Military fiction category of the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book Awards. 2017 Notable Book of the Year from Blue Ink Review. The author feels compelled to state here that the above awards were won despite him putting The Trumpets of Jericho on the market too early. This new Second Edition is the product of fifteen months of rewriting, refining, and adding to his material, making it in his opinion not only a vastly better read than its first incarnation but more deserving of the tale entrusted to it. EDITORIAL REVIEWS can be found either below or on the accompanying page.

     It is a story of genocide, tragedy, ruthless separations, unimaginable heartache, and, eventually, of triumph. It is the personal story of Marion Weinzweig, a young Jewish child caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust in 1940s Poland. Marion's family life in her hometown of Apt was idyllic until the occupying Germans set into motion their relentless purge of Jews. We see through Marion's eyes, and the accounts of her few surviving relatives, the terror of families ripped apart as they were rounded up like cattle and transported to their deaths in concentration camps. To save her life, Marion's parents sent her to live in hiding with a Christian couple. She became a "lonely chameleon," torn from her family, losing all connection with her Jewish heritage and struggling to blend inconspicuously into the non-Jewish world. Her living circumstances kept changing, making her feel, as she terms it, "like an unloved, wild and scared animal." Despite bombings, days of terror and confusion, her ingenuity and determination got her through. Reunited with her father after Poland was liberated, Marion immigrated to Canada, and later moved to America. Lonely Chameleon is a graphic, eye-opening, firsthand account of the inhumanity of the Holocaust. But it is more. It is a powerful message from a young Holocaust survivor to future generations to remain vigilant so such atrocities never happen again.

    

    This is their harrowing story, told in the original words of Joseph and Mendel Berman, and the novelistic writing of their nephew, Harvy Berman. More than 95 percent of Poland's Jews were killed during the war. Weaving in the history of Poland as it was experienced by the Bermans in the 1930s and 1940s, Undying Will is an extraordinary tale of willpower and strength. Josef Stalin infamously said that "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." Undying Will shows the tragedy--and the human triumph--behind the statistics of the Holocaust. As anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism rise again across the West, this powerful, personal recounting of what happened is a reminder of how real the horror of the Holocaust was, how it was resisted, and why it must always be remembered.