In this Robert F. Silbert Honor Book, narrated in the voice of Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum, readers will glimpse the dark reality of life during the Holocaust, and how one boy made it out alive.When twelve-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is separated from his family and shipped off to the Blechhammer concentration camp, his life becomes a never-ending nightmare. With minimal food to eat and harsh living conditions threatening his health, Jack manages to survive by thinking of his family.Supports the Common Core State Standards

    No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief advisor for the defense, uses this pivotal trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial -- as for Evans in this book -- was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in order to illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation.

    He was deported to the Nazi concentration camps in 1942 but miraculously was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, the only one of thirteen deported family members to survive. At age 22, a song he recorded, "Put Your Shoes on Lucy," became a big hit in the United States. He appeared in Cabaret on Broadway, in motion pictures including The Hindenburg with George C. Scott, and in nightclubs. On television he was well-loved for roles on "The Young and the Restless," "Days of our Lives," and of course, as Corporal Louis Lebeau on "Hogan's Heroes." As a Holocaust survivor, Clary has lectured at high schools, colleges, synagogues, and civic groups throughout the U.S. and Canada.

    With great clarity, Jacobs recounts five years of confinement in ghettos and concentration camps. A story told without hatred or bitterness, "Holocaust Survivor" teaches us that when we recognize that freedom comes from within, we are never completely powerless.

    It is the story of a girl who, at the age of six, witnesses a murder being committed by German Storm Troopers. From that moment, the happy life she has known disintegrates. Her family escapes to Prague, where they create a new life. Six years later, the Germans march into Prague. Now she has to escape to England alone and on foot. She walks across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains. By train, fishing boat, and ship, she finally manages to get to England. She comes of age there during the bombing of London. When the war ends, she immediately returns to the Continent to discover the fate of her family. Farewell to Prague is a gripping true story that will fascinate and inspire readers of all ages.

    It bears witness to the horrors endured by a teenage boy whose freedom and family are forcibly wrested from him. This new study guide to Wiesel's moving story also features an annotated bibliography, a listing of other works by the author, and an introduction by literary scholar Harold Bloom.

    

    Autobiography of a Holocaust survivor.

    Shares the romance that unfolded between Czechoslovakian freedom fighter Mirek Friedman and his wife, Blanka Davidovich, in German concentration camp Dachau 3b, and how their love survived despite threats of death.

    His father Barnett Greenman and mother Clara Greenman-Morris were also born in London. His paternal grandparents were Dutch, and at an early age, after the death of his mother, his family moved to Holland, where Leon eventually settled with his wife, Esther, in Rotterdam. Leon was an antiquarian bookseller, and as such travelled to and from London on a regular basis. In 1938, during one such trip, he noticed people digging trenches in the streets and queuing up for gas masks. He hurried back to Holland the same evening, intending to collect his wife and return with her to England, because the whispers of war were getting louder and louder." "However, the British Consulate assured the family that, in the likelihood of war, they would be notified to leave with the diplomatic staff should it become necessary. In May 1940, Holland was overrun by the Nazis. Leon had by then entrusted his passports and money to Dutch friends, but when he asked for their return, his friends told him that they had burnt them for fear of the Germans finding them in their home. The British Consulate was now abandoned, and effectively so were Leon and his family. They had no proof of their British nationality and had no money. From then on, Leon fought to obtain papers to prove they were British, but these arrived too late to save the family from deportation to Auschwitz II, Birkenau, where Esther and their small son, Barney, were gassed on arrival. Leon was chosen with 49 others for slave labour. An Englishman in Auschwitz tells the remarkable story of Leon's survival, of the horrors he saw and endured at Auschwitz, Monowitz and during the Death March to Gleiwitz and Buchenwald camp, where he was eventually liberated. Since that time, Leon has been talking about the Holocaust and continues to recount his experiences to this day, at the age of 90, as a warning to young and old alike."--BOOK JACKET.

    These flares of memory preserve the voices of over forty Jewsfrom throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten. Ninety-two brief vignettes arranged both chronologically and thematically recreate the disbelief and chaos that ensued as families were separated, political rights were abolished, and synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. Survivors remember the daily humiliation, the quiet heroesamong their friends, and the painful abandonment by neighbors as Jews were restricted to ghettos, forced to don yellow stars, and loaded like cattle into trains. Vivid memories of hunger, disease, and a daily existence dependent on cruel luck provide penetrating testimonies to the ruthlessness ofthe Nazi killing machine, yet they also bear witness to the resilience and fortitude of individual souls bombarded by evil. I don't think that there will be many readers who will be able to put this book down.--Jerome Chanes, National Foundation for Jewish Culture

    The photos, both candid snapshots and studied portraits, had been confiscated, but instead of being destroyed they were hidden at great risk and saved. In many cases these pictures are the only remnants left of entire families.In this revised edition of The Last Album there are over 400 of these remarkable photographs. The collection traces the story of how they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau and how the author came to see them through what was essentially a fortuitous accident. In the years that followed, Weiss identified as many people and places in the photos as possible, traveling around the world to track down remaining family members and friends, and listening to stories of the inmates' lives before they were removed to the camp. Many of these accounts are transcribed here.Although the photographs in this book were found at a death camp, they are bursting with life. We see babies; parents with their children; groups of teenagers; people at work, at school, at home, on vacation—normal people leading normal lives.The photographs and reminiscences gathered here offer a rare and intensely personal view of who these individuals were and, most importantly, how they chose to remember themselves.

    Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen.... Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period... Bak's book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing... a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. --From the Foreword by Amos OzIn Painted in Words internationally renowned artist Samuel Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the stories of his life--as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of "The Artist as a Young--and middle-aged and aging--Survivor." The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and art history.

    They missed the liquidation of their ghetto by mere hours, hiding in a shed all night listening to the screams of their fellow Jews. Then went into Germany and took up work in a hotel housing Gestapo officers. Many close escapes and daring moments make this book chilling.

    In 1944, 13-year-old Fritz was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village of Kleinheubach. That same year in Tab, Hungary, 12-year-old Bernie was loaded onto a train with the rest of the village's Jewish inhabitants and taken to Auschwitz, where his whole family was murdered. How to bridge the deadly gulf that separated them in their youth, how not to allow the power of the past to separate them even now, as it separates many others, become the focus of their friendship, and together they begin the project of remembering.The separate stories of their youth are told in one voice, at Bernat Rosner's request. He is able to retrace his journey into hell, slowly, over many sessions, describing for his friend the "other life" he has resolutely put away until now. Frederic Tubach, who must confront his own years in Nazi Germany as the story unfolds, becomes the narrator of their double memoir. Their decision to open their friendship to the past brings a poignancy to stories that are horrifyingly familiar. Adding a further and fascinating dimension is the counterpoint of their similar village childhoods before the Holocaust and their very different paths to personal rebirth and creative adulthood in America after the war.Seldom has a memoir been so much about the present, as we see the authors proving what goodwill and intelligence can accomplish in the cause of reconciliation. This intimate story of two boys trapped in evil and destructive times, who become men with the freedom to construct their own future, has much to tell us about building bridges in our public as well as our personal lives.

    Bert Lewyn was a teenager, only 18 years old. Like thousands of other Jewish families, Bert, his mother and father were all arrested and taken away. His parents were deported to a concentration camp and Bert was conscripted as a slave laborer, forced to work in a weapons factory building machine guns for the German Wehrmacht. This is a story of Bert's escape and subsequent struggle to survive on his own, living underground in Nazi Berlin.

    Fifty-five years after the fact the world still ponders the enormity of this disaster. The Holocaust Encyclopedia is the only comprehensive single-volume work of reference providing both a reflective overview of the subject and abundant detail concerning major events, policy decisions, cities, and individuals. Up-to-date and designed for easy access, the encyclopedia presents information on the major aspects of the Holocaust in essays by scholars from eleven countries who draw on a number of sources—including recently uncovered evidence from the former Soviet bloc—to provide in-depth studies on the political, social, religious, and moral issues of the Holocaust as well as short entries identifying events, sites, and individuals. The book also has more than 250 photographs, many of them rare, and 19 maps. The volume includes: • Raul Hilberg on concentration camps and Gypsies • Ruth Bondy, Israel Gutman, and Dina Porat on major ghettoes • Roger Greenspun on the Holocaust in cinema and television • Richard Breitman on American policy • Michael Cohen on British policy • Michael Berenbaum on theological and philosophical responses • Saul Friedländer on Nazi policy • Michael Hagemeister on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion • Michael R. Marrus on historiography • Christopher R. Browning on the Madagascar Plan • Robert S. Wistrich on Holocaust denial • James E. Young on Holocaust literature

    At first he is proud of his decoration, but soon finds the star overshadowing him. No-one sees the boy, only the star. This affecting allegory, rich with symbolism, gently educates children about the Holocaust in a way that young minds can grasp."

    It is a memoir of horror and hope recounted by a man who survived the organized terror of Hitler’s "Final Solution" as it destroyed entire generations of European Jewish life within ten catastrophic years in the mid-twentieth century. Feldman’s memoir conveys the searing pain that has never left him, while demonstrating the triumphant humanity of a survivor.Feldman vividly describes the impact of the escalating anti-Semitic hatred and violence in Germany during the 1930s, the impact of the notorious Nuremberg Laws in 1935, and the terrifying Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938. By age sixteen, Feldman was living with his parents and three younger sisters in Antwerp, Belgium, during the 1939 German invasions of Poland, marking the start of World War II. In the face of increasing persecution, Feldman’s extended family scattered over the globe in a desperate attempt to remain one step ahead of their Nazi pursuers.Recalling his life on the run, Feldman describes what few survivors have chosen to write about: the Vichy raids of August 26, 1942; the French labor brigades; the Comité Dubouchage; and life in super-vised residence in France under the Italians. While in the south of France, Feldman endured food shortages and Nazi anti-Semitic measures, beginning with work camps and culminating in the deportation and ultimate death of his mother and sisters at Auschwitz.To evade the Germans, Feldman and his father fled into the Italian Alps in September of 1943, hiding between the Allies and the Germans. Aided by local villagers, the Feldmans survived precariously for over a year and a half, along with other Jewish refugees, until that region was liberated. Only then, and only gradually, did Feldman manage to piece together the fate of his surviving family and learn at last of the death of his mother and sisters.Now, as an adult, Alfred Feldman has retraced his escape and exile, taking his wife and children to his hometown in Germany, the mountains in Italy, and Montagnac, where a plaque commemorates his mother and sisters.

    Life was ruled by religion, and he recounts his growing rebelliousness against God, who gives his life meaning and yet allows so much suffering.First set down on the eve of World War II, finished fifty years later, and now published for the first time, Botchki is a testament to a vanished world. This important and moving memoir is essential reading for everyone interested in issues of Jewish life, identity, and exile, as seen through the lens of life in an Eastern European shtetl in the early twentieth century.

    By burning and looting libraries and censoring "un-German" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. The Holocaust and the Book examines this bleak chapter in the history of printing, reading, censorship, and libraries. Topics include the development of Nazi censorship policies, the celebrated library of the Vilna ghetto, the confiscation of books from the Sephardic communities in Rome and Salonika, the experience of reading in the ghettos and concentration camps, the rescue of Polish incunabula, the uses of fine printing by the Dutch underground, and the suppression of Jewish books and authors in the Soviet Union. Several authors discuss the continuing relevance of Nazi book burnings to the present day, with essays on German responses to Friedrich Nietzsche and the destruction of Bosnian libraries in the 1990s. The collection also includes eyewitness accounts by Holocaust survivors and a translation of Herman Kruk's report on the Vilna ghetto library. An annotated bibliography offers readers a concise guide to research in this growing field.

    In this chilling memoir, Wiernicki, a Gentile, details "life" in the infamous death camp, and his battle to survive, physically and morally, in the face of utter evil. The author begins by remembering his aristocratic youth, an idyllic time shattered by German invasion. The ensuing dark days of occupation would fire the adolescent Wiernicki with a burning desire to serve Poland, a cause that led him to valiant action and eventual arrest.As a young non-Jew, Wiernicki was acutely sensitive to the depravity and injustice that engulfed him at Auschwitz. He bears witness to the harrowing selection and extermination of Jews doomed by birth to the gas chambers, to savage camp policies, brutal SS doctors, and rampant corruption with the system. He notes the difference in treatment between Jews and non-Jews. And he relives fearful unexpected encounters with two notorious "Angels of Death" Josef Mengele and Heinz Thilo.War in the Shadow of Auschwitz is an important historical and personal document. Its vivid portrait of prewar and wartime Poland, and of German concentration camps, provides a significant addition to the growing body of testimony by gentile survivors and a heartfelt contribution to fostering comprehension and understanding.

    In Sources of Holocaust Research he distills a lifetime of scholarly investigation into an indispensable primer on the use of sources in the writing of Holocaust history. "It is not a manual or epistemological treatise," Mr. Hilberg advises, "but an analysis of the types of materials, their composition, style, content, and usability." He goes on to describe, first, the "exterior" examination and classification of sources; next the "interior" view--the configuration, characteristic style, and highly selective content of the sources; and, finally, what may be extracted from them, considering the intrinsic problems of the material itself and the "external conditions." Throughout Mr. Hilberg makes use of a rich fund of examples and anecdotes to illustrate his principles. The result is a book that anyone seriously interested in Holocaust research must have.

    But how can there be a visible and growing Jewish presence in Europe, without the significant presence of Jews? Ruth Ellen Gruber explores this phenomenon, traveling through Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere to observe firsthand the many facets of a remarkable trend. Across the continent, Jewish festivals, performances, publications, and study programs abound. Jewish museums have opened by the dozen, and synagogues and Jewish quarters are being restored, often as tourist attractions. In Europe, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, klezmer music concerts, exhibitions, and cafes with Jewish themes are drawing enthusiastic--and often overwhelmingly non-Jewish--crowds. In what ways, Gruber asks, do non-Jews embrace and enact Jewish culture, and for what reasons? For some, the process is a way of filling in communist-era blanks. For others, it is a means of coming to terms with the Nazi legacy or a key to building (or rebuilding) a democratic and tolerant state. Clearly, the phenomenon has as many motivations as manifestations. Gruber investigates the issues surrounding this "virtual Jewish world" in three specific areas: the reclaiming of the built heritage, including synagogues, cemeteries, and former ghettos and Jewish quarters; the representation of Jewish culture through tourism and museums; and the role of klezmer and Yiddish music as typical "Jewish cultural products." Although she features the relationship of non-Jews to the Jewish phenomenon, Gruber also considers its effect on local Jews and Jewish communities and the revival of Jewish life in Europe. Her view of how the trend has developed and where it may be going is thoughtful, colorful, and very well informed.

    Drawing on the center’s central missions is to produce and preserve a series of oral-history videotapes based on the personal experiences of Holocaust survivors who reside in New Jersey. Joseph J. Preil brings together the most compelling testimonies of 153 Holocaust survivors as well as twenty concentration-camp liberators. Through these riveting accounts, the book traces the mass murder of the Jews across Europe in a geographical as well as chronological order. The testimonies in each chapter are grouped by the witnesses’ country or region of origin, preceded by a brief introduction of the history of events in a particular area. In the last part of the book, American soldiers recount their impressions of being present at the liberation of the camps.“If you can imagine that the Jew to the German was like a cockroach. In the United States, if you step on a cockroach . . . it doesn’t mean anything to you. The same thing, exactly the same thing, the Jew was to the German—a cockroach. . . . One particular Shabbos (Sabbath), they shot twelve or thirteen people in my area. In other words, the German had the right, if he saw me, any Jew that he saw in the street, he could go over to you calmly, take out his revolver, and put it to your head, and shoot you down like a . . . roach. . . . It was a free-for-all.”—Testimony of Sol Einhorn, cited in Holocaust Testimonies: European Survivors and American Liberators in New Jersey

    While at Izieu, Georgy regularly wrote letters and sent drawings to his parents, describing his life at the children's home, his dreams and his sorrow. Today, this remarkable collection of letters and drawings remains a testament to the courage and hope of a young boy caught in the midst of one the darkest chapters in the history of mankind. Georgy's hopes for being reunited with his family ended with his murder at the age of eight in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Born in Bucharest, Serge Klarsfeld was just 8 years old when his family's home was raided by the Gestapo. While he, his mother and sister escaped, his father was killed at Auschwitz. Attorney, author and leading historian on the fate of the Jews in France during the Second World War, Klarsfeld has fought relentlessly to bring Nazi officials to justice.