The Bravest Battle: The Twenty-eight Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising


Dan Kurzman - 1975
    Despite the starvation and disease that claimed 50,000 lives per year, the Jews were not dying swiftly enough to suit Heinrich Himmler, who ordered in 1942 that the Warsaw Ghetto be dismantled and the 450,000 inhabitants be deported to the gas chambers at Treblinka. On April 19, 1943, the first day of Passover, two thousand German troops, singing confidently, marched into the ghetto to round up the remnant of remaining Jews. Suddenly, a fifteen-year-old girl tossed a grenade in their midst. Within minutes the German army had been routed. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had begin.This is the first full-scale, step-by-step account of the climatic twenty-eight-day struggle of the poorly armed Jews against their Nazi exterminators. The Bravest Battle took more than two years to write and involved interviewing more than 500 people, including most of the surviving fighters. This moving history cannot be matched for its authenticity and drama. The Bravest Battle is a testament to the Warsaw Jews, who fought for survival with dignity and courage.

Women of the Third Reich


Anna Maria Sigmund - 1998
    Many women in German high society were fascinated by Adolf Hitler and helped him to achieve political power, while women like filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl were fueling Hitler's propaganda machine. The private lives of Hitler's assistants' wives are also explored-revealing Magda Goebbels's complicity in the murder of her six children in 1945, Carin and Emmy Gring's relations with their morphine-addicted husbands, and the knowledge that Margaret Himmler had of her husband's actions as leader of the SS.

Courage and Grace


Yoseph Komem - 2019
    Perpetual mortal danger. Only a combination of resourcefulness and pure luck can save them. Joseph and Yitzhak are two young brothers hiding under fake Christian identities in the Aryan section of a city in Poland during the Holocaust.The two brothers, like their parents, know their lives are in constant danger and that any mistake may expose their true identities, sending them to a painful death.The small family does everything in its power to save itself and is lucky to receive assistance from their courageous gentile friends, but their seemingly free lives outside the ghetto becoming increasingly difficult and complex with every passing day…Before their eyes lies one thing only—the extraordinary struggle to stay alive against all odds.Courage and Grace is the chilling and inspiring documentation of a story that will leave you riveted to your seat, flood you with heartbreaking emotions and, at the same time, with enormous hope for a better future.

Two Who Survived: Keeping Hope Alive While Surviving the Holocaust


Rose Schindler - 2019
    When the persecution of Jews begins, both are plucked from their reality and thrust into concentration camps. They are stripped of everything they know and forced to navigate a truly incomprehensible, volatile, dangerous and unpredictable world. Even when separated from support systems and family members, their drive to survive helps them cope. Despite their exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust, they endure and carry on with a determination that shapes their character forever. Follow the lives of Rose and Max as they learn to adapt to a reality beyond belief and emerge stronger than ever. When they are finally liberated from their concentration camps, they navigate a new world individually before eventually coming together to form what each so tragically lost: A FAMILY

Remember Your Name


Erik G. LeMoullec - 2014
    Medallion. While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood. From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Gorlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Liberated at sixteen, he took on smuggling as a means to survive. It was not until the Bricha approached him and he became a lead operative - smuggling thousands of refugees across country borders - that he was finally able to begin his life again. Teddy's story is one of survival amidst horrific circumstances. The author does not sensationalize the suffering his grandfather and his family endured, but in this work of narrative nonfiction simply recreates this remarkable man's early life during one of the darkest moments of human history.

World War II: The Resistance


C. David North - 2015
    It was not until 1942 that widely dispersed underground organizations would band together to form a united opposition to the occupying Germans. It was not until then that resistance would become the Resistance - a disciplined multi-national movement that would play a significant part in the outcome of World War II. In each occupied nation, resistance groups would grow, gathering and sending information to London, planning increasingly complex sabotage operations, and assisting thousands of people, particularly Jews, in fleeing Nazi-occupied territories. Their actions would eventually become a focused counteroffensive against the German army in 1944, when Allied troops gathered in Great Britain to prepare for the invasion of France. As their widespread activity weakened German outposts in France and other occupied countries, the Allies would gain the foothold they needed to win the war. This is their story.

Born Under a Lucky Star: A Red Army Soldier's Recollections of the Eastern Front of World War II


Ivan Philippovich Makarov - 2020
    That was on his first day at the front.Thrown into an open field to face German tanks and artillery fire, with only rifles and machine guns to defend themselves with, almost 2,000 men of his regiment were wiped out in only six days at the Eastern Front. At this rate, Ivan struggled to comprehend how he would survive the hundreds of battles that lay before him, with death seeming to be the only certainty.In his raw and trenchant memoir, Ivan recounts the terror and despair faced by a Red Army soldier on the Eastern Front.He has no sympathy for Stalin and his incompetent commanders, who sought awards and recognition at the expense of their soldiers’ lives. He simply wanted to serve his country.It is rare to find first-hand accounts of the Great Patriotic War from Red Army soldiers, as many did not survive to tell the tale. For the first time, Ivan reveals his gripping recollections of battles, times, places, and people encountered throughout World War II, from when he was drafted in 1941 until their victory in 1945.These recollections he dared not put on paper until 1992.

Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute


Jonathan Mayo - 2015
    All over the country, people are on the move- concentration camp survivors, Allied PoWs, escaping Nazis- and the civilian population is running out of food. The man who orchestrated this nightmare is in his bunker beneath the capital, saying his farewells. This is the gripping story of Hitler's final hours, as seen through the eyes of those who were with him in the bunker; those fighting in the streets of Germany; and those pacing the corridors of power in Washington, London and Moscow.30th April 1945 was a day that millions had dreamed of, and millions had died for.

Invisible Jews: Surviving the Holocaust in Poland


Eddie Bielawski - 2017
    Not a propitious time and place for a Jewish child to be born.One memory that has been etched indelibly in my mind is the sight of the Nazi army marching toward Russia. Our house was located on the main road leading to the Russian frontier. Day and night they marched - soldiers, trucks, tanks, and more soldiers, in a never ending line - an invincible force. I remember my father, holding me in his arms, saying to my mother, "Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Russians." One night, my father had a dream. In this dream he saw what he had to do: where to build the bunker, how to build it, and even its dimensions.He would build a bunker under a wooden storage shed behind the house. It would be covered with boards, on top of which would be placed soil and bits of straw which would render it invisible. In order to camouflage the entrance, he would construct a shallow box and fill it with earth and cover it with straw so that it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the earthen floor. Air would be supplied through a drain pipe buried in the earth. This was to be our Noah's Ark that would save us from the initial deluge. It took my father about three weeks to finish the job. When he was done, he took my mother and sister into the shed and asked them if they could find the trap door. When they could not, he was satisfied.My mother prepared dry biscuits, jars of jam made out of beets, some tinned goods such as sardines, some sugar and salt. We placed two buckets in the bunker. One bucket was filled with water, the other bucket was empty and would serve as the latrine. We also took down some blankets, a couple of pillows and some warm clothing. We were ready.For three long years, starting in 1941 when the Nazis started the deportations and mass killings, we hid in secret bunkers, dug in fields, under sheds, or constructed in barn lofts. It seems that the only way that a Jew could survive in wartime Poland was to become invisible. So we became invisible Jews.

After the Holocaust the Bells Still Ring


Joseph Polak - 2014
    It is the tale of how one newly takes on the world, having lived in the midst of corpses strewn about in the scores of thousands, and how one can possibly resume life in the aftermath of such experiences. It is the story of the child who decides, upon growing up, that the only career that makes sense for him in light of these years of horror is to become someone sensitive to the deepest flaws of humanity, a teacher of God’s role in history amidst the traditions that attempt to understand it—and to become a rabbi. Readers will not emerge unscathed from this searing work, written by a distinguished, Boston-based rabbi and academic.

Mrs Mahoney's Secret War: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Young Woman's Resistance Against the Nazis


Gretel Wachtel - 2009
    After the war, Gretel fell in love with a British officer. When he was transferred back to England, her determination and bravery were tested once more.

A Girl Called Renee: The Incredible Story of a Holocaust Survivor


Ruth Uzrad - 2017
    This is the unbelievable autobiographical story of Ruth Uzrad, a Jewish teenager whose life was turned upside down by the Nazi regime. After her father was arrested one night from their Berlin apartment by the Gestapo, Ruth’s mother sends 13 year-old Ruth and her two younger sisters out on their escape route across Europe by train to the safety of Belgium. But then the Nazis also reach Belgium, driving Ruth into the French Jewish underground… Later, when the Nazis conquer Belgium, Ruth and one of her sisters escape to France, leaving the youngest sister behind to be taken in by a Belgian foster family. Later, Ruth joins the Jewish underground movement in France and takes on a false identity and a new name, Renee. As an underground fighter, she participates in special operations aimed at rescuing Jews in danger. When the German police set out to arrest her, she manages to cross the border into Spain and eventually makes her way to Israel, where she makes her home and spends the rest of her life.

We Escaped: A Family's Flight from Holland During WWII


Alexander H. ter Weele - 2015
    seasoned with the terror of war. We Escaped plunges the reader into the extraordinary World War II escapades of an ordinary couple and their children as they first escape from Nazi-occupied Holland; and then deal with the war years by leavening danger and stress with the joy and love of everyday family life. It is the song and dance of The Sound of Music seasoned with the terror of guns and blood. The story begins in the Netherlands, a peaceful nation protected by a treaty of neutrality and kinship with Hitler's Germany. The calm is shattered by the cacophony and confusion of battle as, under the guns of panzers, German troops overrun Holland's lines. The ter Weele family's subsequent exodus from their home is told from the points of view of the father, Lieutenant Carl ter Weele, a Dutch reservist called up to defend the Grebbeberg; his wife Margery, an American citizen raised in Boston, who delivers her third child in a hospital not far from the Grebbeberg as war threatens; their oldest son, six-year-old Jan, whose dark eyes and hair lead Nazis to suspect he is Jewish; and their second son, Alex, a blond and fair-skinned imp, who at the age of two charms a German border guard into allowing the family to cross into Switzerland. Within weeks of Germany's conquest of Holland, the family has to flee the dragnet of the Gestapo, which is arresting all Dutch military officers. As far as Carl can see, the only way out is through Germany, and from there it's a tortuous and terrifying journey through Switzerland, Vichy France, Spain, and Portugal, with the Gestapo a threat at every turn.

Berlin Embassy


William Russell - 1940
     But what did the German people think of the war? And what had they actually thought about the rise of the Nazi party? William Russell, a young US diplomat who worked in the American Embassy in Berlin, explains in detail his experiences of Germany in the early phases of the war from August 1939 through to April 1940. By asking questions to his friends, colleagues and people who he passed on the streets, Russell uncovered the state of minds of normal Germans, what they were thinking, doing and saying through the course of 1939 and 1940. Drawing evidence from a variety of sources, including newspapers, the radio, recently published books, as well as the jokes and gossip that circulated on the streets of the German capital, Russell is able to demonstrate how not all Germans were card-waving Nazis, but how the vast majority were politically apathetic, nervous of the future and often outwardly critical of the Nazi regime. Russell explains how many Germans laughed at figures such as Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering when they were in privacy of their own houses. Although written in only second year of the war it is clear that Russell and many of his friends are aware of the impending horrors that the war will cause and he tries desperately throughout the book to do his best for those who would suffer the most at the hands of the Nazi regime. Berlin Embassy is the classic account of Germany and its people in the first year of the Second World War. “The small things that happen to the small people- as reported by a man in a small job in the American embassy in Berlin, who managed to get the man in the street to talk frankly.” Kirkus Reviews “Exciting reading … A very fine book.” William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany William Russell was an author and journalist who after completing his education had worked in the Berlin Embassy during 1939 and 1940. After he left Germany he joined the U.S. Army and served two years as an Order of Battle Specialist in the Intelligence Branch in England. He passed away in 2000. His book Berlin Embassy was first published in 1941.

White House in a Gray City: A Memoir of an Orphan Jewish Boy Who Survived The Holocaust (WW2 True Story)


Itzchak Belfer - 2019
    In 1912, Korczak established a unique orphanage that is to this day a beacon for educators. There he gave children the freedom to develop and manage their talents. They learned about mutual responsibility and caring and how to create a righteous human society. Korczak was murdered by the Nazis at the Treblinka Death Camp when he refused to abandon his children. I will never forget those times; this is a memorial volume The author, Itzchak Belfer, was raised and educated in Korczak's orphanage. We read of his flight from the Nazis through the Polish forests to Russia to become the only survivor in his large family and his attempt to immigrate to Israel, only to be waylaid in a Cypress deportation camp, where he studied art. Then of his renewed life in Israel, where his art commemorates Janusz Korczak, the Holocaust, and the family he lost. Scroll up now to get your copy of White House in a Gray City!