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.

     The book describes Binem's childhood in the rural Polish village of Radziejow, and details how his family and community were devastated by the trauma of the Nazi invasion and unimaginably cruel occupation of Poland. At the age of 24, Binem escapes a German forced labor camp and struggles to survive the harsh Polish winter by sleeping in haystacks during the day and begging food from peasant farmers at night. Through a chance encounter with a former schoolmate, Binem is taken in by the Osten-Sackens, an aristocratic Polish woman (the “Princess”) and her ethnic German husband, who Binem later learns is a secret Gestapo agent. When Germany begins to lose the war, their son, an SS officer (the “Nazi”), forces Binem to vow to protect his parents from inevitable attempts at retribution. Binem makes good on his promise (three times!) saving Osten-Sacken twice from Russian soldiers and later by testifying on his behalf in a Polish court. The book describes Binem’s Holocaust experience in harrowing detail, from its lows, including a suicide attempt in the Jewish graveyard where his parents were buried, to its highs, such as finishing off the war as an honored guest at the Osten-Sacken mansion, and his celebratory speech to the Russian Jewish officers who liberated him.

    Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow. It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt in order to continue togrow and catch up with their Western counterparts.Europe's Growth Champion emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth– institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders– in economic development. It argues that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, was the key to Poland's success. It asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and the rest of Central and EasternEurope with the West, and help to sustain the region's Golden Age. It also acknowledges the future challenges that Poland faces, and that moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland's developmental character.

    He was a student in Saint Petersburg during the Russian Revolution and a painter in Paris in the roaring twenties. As a Polish reserve officer fighting against the invading Nazis in the opening weeks of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. For reasons unknown to this day, he was one of the very few excluded from Stalin’s sanctioned massacres of Polish officers. He never returned to Poland after the war, but worked tirelessly in Paris to keep alive awareness of the plight of his homeland, overrun by totalitarian powers. Czapski was a towering public figure, but painting gave meaning to his life. Eric Karpeles, also a painter, reveals Czapski’s full complexity, pulling together all the threads of this remarkable life.

    Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.   Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.

    However, early America witnessed the development of New York by the Dutch, the southernmost regions by Spain, and what would become eastern Canada by the French after lengthy battles with Britain. In fact, the Seven Years’ War during the 1750s was fought on a nearly global scale between several European belligerents. As a result, when the Revolution began, the Continental Army sported numerous volunteers from Ireland, Scotland, virtually every European nation between France and Russia, and men from the northern and southern borders of the European continent. There are good reasons America doesn’t possess a constitutionally-confirmed national language, despite an English-speaking majority; among the early proposals for such a common language, German and French served as contenders, with the latter going on to become Western Europe’s official diplomatic language. Likewise, those who accomplished the legislative, diplomatic, and military miracles that helped 13 separate colonies hold off the greatest power in the world represented a multi-national heritage. The prospects for a rustic, untrained revolution across the Atlantic carried powerful ramifications for politics, economics, and cultural identity of the individual. Autocrats of the 18th century feared an emerging model from the British-American war that might be refashioned by dissidents within their own colonies. Among those living the consequences of defeat and exile, the soldier class of Europe paid particularly close attention. Some were rapt by the growing ideology of the Enlightenment movement as it pertained to their own cultures while others grew weary of inertia imposed by an inability to practice their craft. For the gifted Tadeusz Kościuszko, both were likely true. However, Poland’s famous soldier, artist, engineer, and statesman possessed a uniquely expanded vision that perceived the American conflict as the test of a new universal paradigm. A philosophical revolution in itself, the vision held by Locke and Jefferson for a previously unknown standard of individual liberty found an obsessive place in Kościuszko’s life view. His response to its power was to make him a much-heralded citizen of both continents in perpetuity, in war and peacetime. A hero in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, Kościuszko not only fought as an officer in the Continental Army of General Washington, but also designed and constructed the defenses for some of America’s earliest cities and important military defenses. As a friend to the fledgling state, he went on to lead a “national insurrection” in his Polish homeland against centuries-old Russian domination, mirroring the American effort. Denying allegiance and assistance to Tsars and Emperors such as Catherine and Napoleon unless Polish independence was guaranteed, Kościuszko witnessed the disappearance of Poland from the world map, an absence not rectified for well over a century. Today, streets, bridges, monuments, and even neighborhoods bear Kościuszko’s name across the country, and in Polish communities, he is often hailed as a hero equal to General Washington himself. Tadeusz Kościuszko: The Life and Legacy of Poland’s Most Famous General profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most important figures.

    When she was growing up, there were no Jewish schools for girls. Sarah had a dream. She wanted to start her very own school. But the girls weren’t interested. What could Sarah do? How would she succeed? Sarah Builds a School tells the inspiring story of a great woman who changed the face of Jewish education for girls in the last century. Children will love this level ed reader and enjoy its delightful illustrations