Best of
Holocaust

1990

Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir


David Faber - 1990
    This is the riveting, true story of a young boy's survival in the face of Nazi atrocities. In the mid-1960s, the German government contacted David Faber to testify against Nazi war criminals. Until then, he did not know that his older brother, Romek, whom the Nazis had tortured to death many years earlier, had been involved in a Polish Underground plot to avert Nazi Germany's ability to create an atomic bomb. When David finally agreed to testify, he began to relive all the horrors of his experiences during the war: concentration camps, murders, tortures, starvation, and disease. When David Faber was 13 years old, he had witnessed the Nazi murders of his parents, brother Romek, and five of his six sisters. He survived nine concentration camps between the ages of 13-18, from 1939 to 1945, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When he was liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, he weighed a mere 72 pounds. Because of Romek fulfills David's promise to his dead mother that he would survive and tell the world about the horrors committed against him and his family. This moving narrative is also a useful tool for educators. To today's students, the Holocaust too often seems to be an abstract event in the dim past. Because of Romek pulls the reader into the story, thereby illuminating the past and putting a face on history.

Eichmann in My Hands: A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner


Peter Z. Malkin - 1990
      1n 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street—and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there—was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin’s identity as Eichmann’s captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story—from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.   The result is a portrait of two men. One, a freedom fighter, intellectually curious and driven to do right. The other, the dutiful Good German who, through his chillingly intimate conversations with Malkin, reveals himself as the embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Singular, riveting, troubling, and gratifying, Eichmann in My Hands “remind[s] of what is at stake: not only justice but our own humanity” (New York Newsday).   Now Malkin’s story comes to life on the screen with Oscar Isaac playing the heroic Mossad agent and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley playing Eichmann in Operation Finale.

In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust


Robert Marshall - 1990
    Enduring hunger, rats, thirst, dysentery, and incredible psychological pressure, they hid for nearly two years in the sewer system beneath the city of Lvov. Their courage, as detailed in this inspiring book, is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Auschwitz: A History in Photographs


Teresa Świebocka - 1990
    Photographic survey of Auschwitz concentration camp chronicling its historical facts.

From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences


Elie Wiesel - 1990
    Included are Wiesel's landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the trial of Klaus Barbie and his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 (Studies in Jewish History)


Leni Yahil - 1990
    Representing twenty years of research and reflection, Leni Yahil's book won the Shazar Prize, one of Israel's highest awards for historical work. Now available in English, The Holocaust offers a sweeping look at the Final Solution, covering not only Nazi policies, but also how Jews and foreign governments perceived and responded to the unfolding nightmare. The Holocaust is astonishingly comprehensive. Yahil weaves a gripping chronological narrative that stretches from the Norwegian fjords to the Greek islands, from Amsterdam to Tehran--and even Shanghai. Her writing is balanced, objective, and compelling, as she systematically explores the evolution of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, probing its politics, planning, goals, and key figures. Yahil uses her command of the many relevant languages to marshal an impressive array of documentary and statistical evidence, driving her narrative forward with telling details and personal accounts--such as a survivor's description of her perseverance during a death march, or the story of the Struma, a boat that sank with over 700 Jewish refugees when the British refused to receive it in Palestine. Along the way, she destroys persistent myths about the Holocaust: that Hitler had no plan for exterminating the Jews, that the Jews themselves went peacefully to the slaughter. Though Yahil finds that Nazi policies were often inconsistent, particularly during the years before the war, she conclusively demonstrates that Hitler was always working toward a final reckoning with world Jewry, envisioning his war as a war against the Jews. The book also recounts numerous uprisings and acts of resistance in ghettos and concentration camps, as well as the activities of Jewish partisan units. Yahil describes the work of Jews in America, Palestine, and world organizations on behalf of Hitler's victims--often in the face of resistance by the Allied governments and neutral states--and explores the factors that affected the success of rescue efforts. The Holocaust is a monumental work of history, unsurpassed in scope and insightful detail. Objective yet compassionate, Leni Yahil brings together the countless diverse strands of this epic event in a single gripping account.

Anton the Dove Fancier: and Other Tales of the Holocaust


Bernard Gotfryd - 1990
    Here we watch young Bernard break curfew to secure a rare chicken for the High Holidays—only to see it given to the Christian janitor because it is not kosher; we meet Alexandra, a Polish resistance fighter who enlists the teenaged Bernard in the cause but who perishes while he survives; and we share Bernard's fear as he spends one very uncomfortable night—hours after his liberation—in the seemingly sympathetic home of the parents of a young SS officer.

How Dark the Heavens: 1400 Days in the Grip of Nazi Terror


Sidney Iwens - 1990
    The night before, he had been at a dance, enjoying himself with the other Jewish boys of his small Lithuanian city. Now he stoodwatching a dogfight between two distant planes. Tomorrow he would be fleeing for his life -- a flight that would last for nearly four terror-filled years.Lithuania, Latvia, and White Russia, directly in the path of the invading Germans, fell into the murderous clutches of the first SS Einsatzgruppen, the Special Action Groups whose only mission was to kill Jews. In four months, aided by virulent anti-Semitic Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other native peoples, they shot 250,000 Baltic Jews. And that was just for starters. Sidney himself, herded together with other boys and young men in a city prison,reached the very gates of the killing ground, only to be reprieved temporarily -- because the SS had run out of ditches.Thereafter, his life became a patchwork of hiding, pretending to be a skilled workman (and thus worth the Germans' while to preserve for a time), fleeing to the partisans, returning to the ghetto, and finally being shipped west to Dachau.Sidney tells his story in diary form, reconstructed from memory of the diary he actually kept during the Holocaust years. he tells of his bittersweet romance in the shadow of betrayal and death, of the horrendous experiences of his friendsand fellow survivors, of having every hand against Jews, even fellow enemies ofthe Nazis, of the occasional acts of generosity -- usually from the most unpredictable source, German soldiers themselves -- of his slow starvation and final rescue (like his first) at the gates of death.This vivid and dramatic story of a Holocaust survivor is in a class by itself -- a day-by-day recounting of murder, heroism, stoic endurance, good luck, bad luck, love, intrigue, and humanity.

All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-43


Jonathan Steinberg - 1990
    Jews who fell into the hands of the German army ended up in concentration camps; none of those taken by the Italians suffered the same fate. Yet the protectors of the Jews were no philo-Semites, nor were they (often) great respecters of human life. Some of those same officers had sanctioned savage atrocities against Ethiopians and Arabs in the years before the war. Jonathan Steinberg uses this remarkable and poignant story to unravel the motives and forces underpinning both Fascism and Nazism. As a renowned historian of both Germany and Italy, he is uniquely placed to answer the underlying question; why?

In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen


Nechama Tec - 1990
    A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story. A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Tec vividly describes how Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve as translator and personal secretary to the German in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties--reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler--he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending aktions and to sabatoge Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of doomed Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit. After the war, Father Daniel (as he is now known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as a Christian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. Today he continues to devote himself to bridging the gap between Christians and Jews. In the Lion's Den offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary,


Avraham Tory - 1990
    After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel.The diary incorporates Avraham Tory's collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when--if not simply carted off and murdered in a random "action"--Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory's overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror.Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory's is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider's view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert's masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.

Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps


Frieda W. Aaron - 1990
    It reveals the impact of the immediacy of experience as a formative influence on perception, response, and literary imagination, arguing that literature that is contemporaneous with unfolding events offers perceptions different from those presented after the fact.Documented here is the emergence of poetry as the dominant literary form and quickest reaction to the atrocities. The authors shows that the mission of the poets was to provide testimony to their epoch, to speak for themselves and for those who perished. For the Jews in the condemned world, this poetry was a vehicle of cultural sustenance, a means of affirming traditional values, and an expression of moral defiance that often kept the spirit of the readers from dying.The explication of the poetry (which has been translated by the author) offer challenging implications for the field of critical theory, including shifts in literary practices--prompted by the growing atrocities--that reveal a spectrum of complex experimental techniques..

In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation


Aaron Hass - 1990
    Now in their thirties and forties, these men and women describe their relationships with their parents and offer their perceptions of the impact of the Holocaust on their families. They give voice to memories and feelings about which some of them have never spoken before. A child of survivors himself and a distinguished clinical psychologist, Hass writes about the lingering presence of the Holocaust in his own life.

Hear O Israel: A Story of the Warsaw Ghetto


Terry Walton Treseder - 1990
    A Jewish boy describes life in the Warsaw ghetto and his family's ultimate transference to and decimation in the camp of Treblinka.