Best of
Holocaust

2009

Once & Then


Morris Gleitzman - 2009
    There's always a chance they can come true.Felix is lucky. Unlike the other children in the orphanage, he's certain his parents will come back for him one day. And whatever the Nazis do and however many books they burn, Felix's imagination provides him and his companions with an endless supply of stories - stories that protect them when they're on the run, shield them from the violent madness all around, give them hope when all seems lost, and one day may even save Felix's life.Once & Then is a spellbinding story of hope and imagination in the most terrible circumstances.However my story turns out, I'll never forget how lucky I am.

Surviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz


Eva Mozes Kor - 2009
    While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele and subjected to sadistic medical experiments and forced to fight daily for their own survival. Through this book, readers will learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil. The book also includes an epilogue on Eva's recovery from this experience and her remarkable decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Through her museum and her lectures, she has dedicated her life to giving testimony on the Holocaust, providing a message of hope for people who have suffered, and working toward goals of forgiveness, peace, and the elimination of hatred and prejudice in the world.

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi


Neal Bascomb - 2009
    Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle (and whose rare surveillance photographs are published here for the first time). The capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out of Argentina to stand trial is the stunning conclusion to this thrilling historical account, told with the kind of pulse-pounding detail that rivals anything you'd find in great spy fiction.

Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last


Israel Meir Lau - 2009
    Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.Lau, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, also chronicles his life after the war, including his emigration to Mandate Palestine during a period that coincides with the development of the State of Israel. The story continues up through today, with that once-lost boy of eight now a brilliant, charismatic, and world-revered figure who has visited with Popes John Paul and Benedict; the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and countless global leaders including Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Tony Blair.

The Bleeding Sky


Louis Brandsdorfer - 2009
    Growing up Jewish in a small Polish town near the German border, my mother and one sister were all that survived from among her parents, 4 sisters, 2 brothers, husband and young daughter. Persecuted and hunted by the Germans. Hiding with friendly Poles. Imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, labor camps and Auschwitz. This is the story of how many of them died and how my mother struggled to survive.

Escape: Children of the Holocaust


Allan Zullo - 2009
    Their compelling accounts are based on exclusive, personal interviews with the survivors. Using real names, dates and places, these stories are factual versions of their recollections.You will read how a brave teenage boy who was shot by a Nazi guard still managed to escape the notorious Treblinka death camp... how a determined young girl who was repeatedly captured and tortured by the Nazis fled with her life time and again, including twice from a firing squad... how a 13-year-old boy with no possessions other than the clothes on his back survived for six months in Nazi-occupied territory... how a 12-year-old girl cheated death while she was being marched to the gas chamber... how a young Jewish girl talked her way out of a certain execution and then lived among the Nazis, pretending to be a Catholic... how a little boy survived a deadly Nazi ambush... how a young girl survived seven concentration camps, including the infamous Auschwitz II-Birkenau where she leaped out of a truck that was taking her directly to the gas chambers.Their compelling stories reveal that even in the darkest days of humanity, when all hope appears lost, the strength of the human spirit still shines brightly.(From Allan Zullo's website)

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife


Francine Prose - 2009
    Approved by both the Anne Frank House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the Frank family, this work of literary criticism unravels the complex, fascinating story of the diary and effectively makes the case for it being a work of art from a precociously gifted writer.

Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed


Patrick Woodhouse - 2009
    Over the course of the next two and a half years, an insecure, chaotic and troubled young woman was transformed into someone who inspired those with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp at Westerbork and with whom she eventually perished at Auschwitz. Through her diary and letters, she continues to inspire those whose lives she has touched since. She was an extraordinarily alive and vivid young woman who shaped and lived a spirituality of hope in the darkest period of the twentieth century. This book explores Etty Hillesum's life and writings, seeking to understand what it was about her that was so remarkable, how her journey developed, how her spirituality was shaped, and what her profound reflections on the roots of violence and the nature of evil can teach us today.

Gift of Life


Henri Landwirth - 2009
    He started the Give Kids the World foundation andDignity U Wear charity.

Kiss Every Step: A Survivor's Memoir from the Nazi Holocaust


Doris Martin - 2009
    To begin their reign of terror, the Nazis burned down Bendzin's beautiful synagogue with some 200 helpless Jews inside. Most Jewish families in Bendzin, and rest of Poland were completely wiped out by the Holocaust. The Szpringers were just an ordinary middle-class family, but through many incredible strokes of luck, or perhaps miracles, all seven of them survived. For an entire Jewish family in Poland to survive the Holocaust is amazing--likely unique. What is more remarkable is how they survived. This is their story.

What If They Find Us?


Kathy Clarke - 2009
    

Treasures from the Attic: the Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank's Family


Mirjam Pressler - 2009
    But in the attic in this particular house, a treasure trove of historic importance is found. Rarely does this become an actuality, but when Helene Elias died, no one could put a price on what she left behind. Helene Elias was born Helene Frank, sister to Otto Frank, and therefore aunt to Anne Frank. Ensconced upstairs in the house she inherited from her mother, and eventually passed on to her son, Buddy Elias, Anne’s cousin and childhood playmate, was the documented legacy of the Frank family: a vast collection of photos, letters, drawings, poems, and postcards preserved throughout decades—a cache of over 6,000 documents in all. Chronicled by Buddy’s wife, Gertrude, and renowned German author Mirjam Pressler, these findings weave an indelible, engaging, and endearing portrait of the family that shaped Anne Frank. They wrote to one another voluminously; recounted summer holidays, and wrote about love and hardships. They reassured one another during the terrible years and waited anxiously for news after the war had ended. Through these letters, they rejoiced in new life, and honored the memories of those they lost.  Anne’s family believed themselves to ordinary members of Germany’s bourgeoisie. That they were wrong is part of history, and we celebrate them here with this extraordinary account.  Insert Authors’ photo: © Jürgen BauerMirjam Pressler is one of Germany’s most beloved authors. She was the German translator of Anne Frank’s diary.

State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda


Susan Bachrach - 2009
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is addressing this topic today because, in an age of instant electronic communication, disseminators of messages and images of intolerance and hate have new tools, while at the same time consumers seem less able to cope with the vast amounts of unmediated information bombarding them daily. It is hoped that a deeper understanding of the complexities of the past may help us respond more effectively to today’s propaganda campaigns and biased messages.

Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived


Lyn Smith - 2009
    

Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy's Story of Survival, 1941-1946


Greg Dawson - 2009
    When disaster strikes her hometown and her family is condemned to exile and execution, Zhanna manages to escape the famed Nazi death march to Dorbitsky Yar and uses her rare musical gift to help her survive. Performing and giving concerts for the occupying German troops as they move throughout Europe, Zhanna keeps her true identity a secret until a young American soldier with ties to Julliard adopts her. Upon her emigration to America, Zhanna’s gift flourishes and she becomes one of the first Jewish refugees to enter Julliard.

Escape, Evasion and Revenge: The True Story of a German-Jewish RAF Pilot Who Bombed Berlin and Became a POW


Marc H. Stevens - 2009
    He joined the RAF in 1939 and after eighteen months of pilot training he started flying bombing missions against his own country. He completed twenty-two missions before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Nazis in September 1941. To escape became his raison d'être and his great advantage was that he was in his native country. He was recaptured after each of his several escapes, but the Nazis never realized his true identity. He took part in the logistics and planning of several major breakouts, including The Great Escape, but was never successful in getting back to England. After liberation, when the true nature of his exploits came to light, he was one of only 69 members of the RAF to be awarded the Military Cross. He then served as a British spy at the beginning of the Cold War before emigrating to Canada to resume a normal life.

The Other Schindler... Irena Sendler: Savior of the Holocaust Children


Abhijit Thite - 2009
    This is the incredible true story that combines many facts - together, they form one of history’s most fascinating and at the same time, gruesome eras.Germany’s occupation of Poland during the Second World War set off a chain of events that were unprecedented in their complexities of human behaviour. With the largest Jewish population in Europe, Poland suffered the worst fallout of German atrocities. From containment of Jews in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto to their ultimate annihilation in the extermination camps, World War II forms a sordid tale of discrimination and hate.Against this is the fragrance of hope and kindness. When the world is in peril, deliverance always comes, and so it was that a few people defied the odds to emerge angel in times of distress, beacons of hope amidst the throes of darkness.This is the true account of a woman who was as gentle as she was steely-minded.Irena Sendler, a little lady who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto is today known all over the world, with thousand of websites dedicated to her. This, though, is the first complete published book of her incredible journey from an inspired young girl to a nonagenarian who spurned all personal glory.

The Last Sunrise, A True Story


Harold Gordon - 2009
    Little by little, he found himself devoid of friends and relatives-- the Nazi took them all. Imprisoned but not defeated he grew up in Nazi concentration camps as a political prisoner maked for death, as on enemy of the state, and lived to tell his story. This is not a book of a defeated person seeking sympathy; rather it is to demonstrate to others that despite adverse living conditions, deprived of a childhood and education for more than four and a half years imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, one can prevail and live to tell his story. It is not the intention of the author to describe the event of World War Two in great detail and with accuracy. Neither is it intended to blame the German people for the atrocities that the Nazis committed against the Jewish people and others who or suffered during those war years. "Born in the year 1930 in Grodno Poland and condemned to DEATH at the tender age of nine by Hitler and his Nazis. To be gassed and burned in the gas chambers and crematoriums of such Death Camps as Auschwitz, Dachau, and others. That little boy was me more than 70 years ago. I feel compelled to tell my story for all who died at the hands of the Nazis and who can speak no more. I hope to show an example to others that one can prevail and live a productive life even though one suffered and has been ruthlessly abused at the hands of others. Already at the Open Gates of the Gas Chamber of Auschwitz, only a few feet away from the final doors of no return of the undressing room, when the Sword of Death was lifted from my throat by the Greatest Power we all know and call God".

Guardian Angel House


Kathy Clark - 2009
    It's 1944, and she knows the world has become a dangerous place for Jews. Now that the Nazis have invaded Hungary, nowhere is safe, including her home in Budapest. But when Mama decides to send Susan and her little sister, Vera, to a Catholic convent to hide from the Nazi soldiers, Susan is shocked. Will they really be safe in a building full of strangers? How will she be able to protect and comfort her sister? What will happen to them in this place full of new rules and different rituals? And who are these women, the nuns, who dress so differently?Susan and Vera feel better when they discover that they are not the only Jewish girls being hidden in the convent. But danger still surrounds them, with the risk of discovery by the Nazis a constant threat. Susan and Vera learn the true nature of courage as the nuns risk their lives to protect the girls in their care.

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir


Claude Lanzmann - 2009
    The Patagonian Hare is the story of a man who has searched at every moment for existential adventure, who has committed himself deeply to what he believes in, and who has made his life a battle.The Patagonian Hare, a number-one bestseller in France, has been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, and Portuguese. Claude Lanzmann's brilliant memoir has been widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, was hailed as "a true literary and historic event" in the pages of Le Monde, and was awarded the prestigious Welt-Literaturpreis in Germany.

Holocaust


Doris L. Bergen - 2009
    Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this history traces not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the disabled, and other groups deemed undesirable. With clear and eloquent prose, Bergen explores the two interconnected goals that drove the Nazi German program of conquest and genocide purification of the so-called Aryan race and expansion of its living space and discusses how these goals affected the course of World War II. Including illustrations and firsthand accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses, the book is immediate, human, and eminently readable.

We Were the Lucky Ones


Esther Neier Fleishman - 2009
    With the Nazis in power, Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it unmistakenly clear that Jews could not survive in Germany. A few months later, Esther boarded a train by herself to travel to safety in England. This is her story.

Here, There Are No Sarah's: A Woman's Courageous Fight in the Soviet Partisons and Her Bittersweet Fulfillment of the American Dream


Sonia Shainwald Orbuch - 2009
    Urging her family and neighbors to leave a wretched hiding place during the liquidation of their ghetto, she and her parents and uncle spent a brutal winter in the forests and then joined a heroic Soviet partisan brigade. After the liberation, her family spent three years in a Displaced Persons camp near Frankfurt, and eventually reached America. But Sonia's life in her adopted land has been both tragic and triumphant. "Here, There Are No Sarahs" is co-authored by Holocaust scholar Fred Rosenbaum whose "Taking Risks" (with former partisan Joseph Pell) was praised by the San Francisco Chronical as "so extraordinary that it transcends the genre." As they were completing their manuscript, Orbuch and Rosenbaum discovered that a trove of touching family correspondence written in the 1930s and 40s lay in a closet in Argentina. The letters, some in Sonia's own hand, were copied, sent to the Bay Area, and translated. Several are published in the book's appendix, along with love poetry penned in the forest in 1943.About the AuthorSONIA SHAINWALD ORBUCH was born and raised in Luboml, Poland. During the liquidation of her shtetl in October 1942, she and her parents and uncle fled to the forest and, after enduring a brutal winter in the open, joined the Fyodorov partisans and resisted Nazi oppression. In 1945, she married the Holocaust survivor Isaak Orbuch and the couple had two children, Bella and Paul, and a granddaughter, Eva. For more than half a century, Sonia has been highly active in numerous Jewish organizations in New York and California. She now lives in Marin County and speaks about her experiences in schools and community centers.FRED ROSENBAUM is the founding director of Lehrhaus Judaica, the largest school for adult Jewish education in the American West. He has taught modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at several Bay Area universities and has written four books, most recently the award-winning "Taking Risks," co-authored with the former Soviet partisan Joseph Pell.

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City


Barbara Engelking - 2009
    Remarkably, a full history of the Ghetto has never been written, despite the publication over some sixty years of numerous memoirs, studies, biographical accounts, and primary documents. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City is this history, researched and written with painstaking care and devotion over many years and now published for the first time in English.The authors explore the history of the ghetto’s evolution, the actual daily experience of its thousands of inhabitants from its creation in 1940 to its liquidation following the uprising of 1943. Encyclopedic in scope, the book encompasses a range of topics from food supplies to education, religious activities to the Jundenrat’s administration. Separate chapters deal with the mass deportations to Treblinka and the famous uprising. A series of original maps, along with biographies, a glossary, and a bibliography, completes this masterful work.

Number 176520: The Story Of Paul Argiewicz, A Teenage Holocaust Survivor


Deanne Joseph Ebner - 2009
    

Album of My Life (The Azrieli Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs)


Ann Szedlecki - 2009
    Instead, she ended up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union, enduring the harsh conditions of northern Siberia under Stalin’s Communist regime. Szedlecki’s beautifully written story, which lovingly reconstructs her pre-war childhood in Lodz, is also compelling for its candour about her experiences as a woman in the Soviet Union during World War II. As a very young woman without family, living largely by her wits, she was only too aware of her own vulnerability, and she met every challenge with a fierce determination to survive.

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews


Peter Longerich - 2009
    The book received universal acclaim, and is now generally recognized by historians as the standard account of this horrific chapter in human history. Now finally available in English, this masterful history uses an unrivalled range of sources to lay out in clear detail the steps taken by the Nazis that would lead ultimately to the Final Solution. Focusing closely on the perpetrators and exploring the process of decision making, Longerich convincingly shows that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses. Rather, from 1933 anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule--and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions. Holocaust is perhaps most remarkable for its extensive use of the 1930s archives of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, which re-emerged in the 1990s after years languishing in Moscow. The letters and reports from this archive document in detail the attacks suffered by ordinary Jewish people from their German neighbors. They show how, contrary to what has been believed in the past, the German populace responded relatively enthusiastically to Nazi anti-Semitism. This long-awaited English edition has been fully updated by Longerich himself. It features revised appendices with notes and further reading, as well as a new preface by the author. In addition, Longerich has added new material on the Jewish victims and on the camps and the ghettos, and has extended the story from the end of the war right up to the present day. In all, it is the most complete treatment ever published on the history of this monumental tragedy.

A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism


Giulio Meotti - 2009
    Since the “Second Intifada” began ten years ago, Palestinian terrorists have claimed 1,700 Israeli civilians. This equates to a staggering 70,000 victims, when adjusted to the United States population for scale.In A New Shoah, Italian journalist Giulio Meotti’s extensive interviews with those Israeli families torn apart by hundreds of daily attacks in buses, cafés, kibbutzim, restaurants, night clubs, and religious shrines appear for the first time. A New Shoah reveals the stories, ideals, and faces behind the statistics, from the anticommunist dissidents who fled Moscow, to the American businessman who left everything behind to live the dream of Jewish pioneers.The remarkable individuals who make up A New Shoah reveal the raison d'être of the State of Israel and make a definitive case for its safeguarding. Judaism teaches that for survivors, the hazkarah, or the act of remembering, is the only way to defy the murder of Jewish people by their enemies. When we read these pages and remember, we empower Israel’s resistance to terror.

Essie: The True Story of a Teenage Fighter in the Bielski Partisans


Essie Shor - 2009
    Living in the forest through bitter winter stalking and being stalked Essie s life in the Bielski Partisan camp is full of danger, adventure, and intrigue. Essie Shor was just 16 when the Nazis invaded her town, Novogrudek (then a part of Poland, now in Belarus) and killed 4000 Jews on a single day, including her mother and all her brothers and sisters. The 700 who remained, including Essie and her father, were herded into prison-like conditions in the ghetto the Nazis established. But Essie escaped at night through a hole in the fence, and became one of the first 25 Jews to join her cousins, the Bielski Brothers, in an encampment that would eventually save 1200 Jews. Living in the forest, we no longer felt like cattle, as we had in the ghetto. However, we had to move constantly. There were German soldiers looking for us everywhere, and sometimes villagers living nearby would tell them where we were. Once, we had to leave in a hurry when the Nazis discovered the hoof prints of our cows in the snow. This was a different kind of fear. We went from being caged to being hunted. And to being a hunter. Essie became a teenage Partisan, a guerilla fighter in the resistance. More than 60 years later, Essie still remembers those two years fighting for the freedom of her people. Now, as more people learn about the Bielski Partisans by watching the movie, Defiance, she shares her dramatic story at last.

Anne Frank


Laura Hamilton Waxman - 2009
    The book describes the Frank family's escape from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, their two years in hiding in a secret annex, and finally their capture by the Nazis. Anne's precious diary gets left behind. Anne does not survive Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But her father survives and, after the war ends, returns to Amsterdam, finds Anne's diary, and publishes it. The author, in a touching but understated way, captures the spirit of this young Jewish girl and her powerful words.

Adorable Adele: A Modern Fairy Tale


Peter Stephan Jungk - 2009
    The painting was confiscated by the Nazis when Ferdinand Bloch, by then a widower, fled Austria in 1939. After spending many years in a Viennese museum, it was finally reclaimed by Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria, who parted with it in 2006, knowing that she wanted this long-lost masterpiece to be seen by as many people as possible. It is now one of the most important pieces in the collection of New York's renowned Neue Galerie. Illustrated with all of the pattern, color and gilt of fin-de-siècle Vienna, this sophisticated story book is a delight for children and adults alike.

Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld


Beate Klarsfeld - 2009
    They met on the Paris Metro and fell in love, and became famous when Beate slapped the face of the West German chancellor--a former Nazi--Kurt Georg Kiesinger.For the past half century, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, prosecuted, and exposed Nazi war criminals all over the world, tracking down the notorious torturer Klaus Barbie in Bolivia and attempting to kidnap the former Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka on the streets of Cologne. They have been sent to prison for their beliefs and have risked their lives protesting anti-Semitism behind the Iron Curtain in South America and in the Middle East. They have been insulted and exalted, assaulted and heralded; they've received honors from presidents and letter bombs from neo-Nazis. They have fought relentlessly not only for the memory of all those who died in the Holocaust but also for modern-day victims of genocide and discrimination across the world. And they have done it all while raising their children and sustaining their marriage.Now, for the first time, in Hunting the Truth, a major memoir written in their alternating voices, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld tell the thrilling story of a lifetime dedicated to combating evil.

I Learned a New Word Today...: Genocide


Elizabeth Hankins - 2009
    As his fifth grade class explores the shocking history of countries ranging from Armenia to Sudan, Javier realizes that the past--and even the present--is telling him a story that he cannot ignore. Then he overhears a conversation that triggers a mysterious chain of events at his school. Now Javier is faced with the reality that no one is immune to the consequences of genocide. And perhaps everyone has a responsibility to help end it, even himself.

Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory


Marianne Hirsch - 2009
    Known as Czernowitz, the “Vienna of the East” under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II—yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore—but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946


Deborah Dwork - 2009
    As persecution, war, and deportation savaged their communities, Jews tried to flee Nazi Europe through legal and clandestine routes. In their multifaceted tale of Jewish refugees during and after the Nazi era, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt braid the private and public realms, personal memory and official history. They probe the challenges faced by German Jewish refugees; the dispute among the Swiss on allowing Jews to cross their border; the dangers braved by covert guides who helped the hunted out of occupied France; and the creation of postwar displaced person camps, which have much to tell us about refugee camps today. Grounded in archival research throughout Europe and America, hundreds of oral histories, and thousands of newly discovered letters, Flight from the Reich shows how the lives of people thread together to form history.

Whispers Series #2 From the Camps


Kathy Kacer - 2009
    Stripped of their clothes, their possessions, and, in many cases, their families, they nevertheless held on to the hope of freedom. Despite the insurmountable odds against survival, these children lived to tell their tales in the second installment of the Whispers series.

The Death of the Shtetl


Yehuda Bauer - 2009
    Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls. In line with his belief that “history is the story of real people in real situations,” Bauer tells moving stories about what happened to individual Jews and their communities.Over a million people, approximately a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust, came from the  shtetls. Bauer writes of the relations between Jews and non-Jews (including the actions of rescuers); he also describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, efforts to escape to the forests, and Jewish participation in the Soviet partisan movement. Bauer’s book is a definitive examination of the demise of the shtetls, a topic of vast importance to the history of the Holocaust.

Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust


Anton Weiss-Wendt - 2009
    A country known for its benevolent treatment of ethnic minorities, Estonia had a small number of indigenous Jews, and anti-Semitism existed on a relatively limited scale. However, many ethnic Estonians, acting as auxiliary security forces under the guidance of the German security police, participated in the murder of thousands of Estonian, Czech, and German Jews. Weiss-Wendt investigates these acts of genocide by posing the simple question: What prompted the Estonians to cooperate with the Nazis? He argues that the actions were voluntary but that the reasons varied. Narrating the history of Estonia’s involvement, Weiss-Wendt presents lucid explanations regarding the relationships between nation-building, mass violence, and the brutal effects of authoritarian oppression on occupied states.The first book-length exploration of this aspect of the Holocaust, Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust enriches our knowledge of ethnic violence and reinvigorates the current debates over the roots and operation of the Holocaust.