But she left behind a notebook in which she recorded her thoughts, fears and dreams. Now, after 60 years, that notebook hs been recovered, opening a unique, moving window into everyday life of Polish Jews caught in the throes of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution.

    German soldiers have invaded his hometown of Krakow, Poland. Forced with his family to leave their home, business, and belongings, Joseph embarks on an adventure that changes his life forever. The family seeks shelter with a Polish peasant family in a small village, but the threat of discovery by the Nazis becomes imminent. Ultimately, Joseph determines that the best course of action is to join his brother, Dolek, in a forced labor camp. Thus begins a tortuous existence surviving six different concentration camps from the ages of fourteen to seventeen. Along the way he abandons family and faith. He curses God for allowing the Holocaust to happen and becomes an atheist. After a brief encounter with Christians imprisoned in the same camp, Joseph is stunned by their demonstration of faith, a faith he a had long-since left behind. This group of Bible students, known as Bibelforscher, leaves an indelible impression on his mind. Years later, after emigrating to the United States, he converts to a Christian faith. The Altered I chronicles Joseph's journey from his zealous beginnings in Judaism to his conversion, while shining new light on an untold story of the Holocaust.

    On the first day of Operation Barbarossa, in the midst of battle, Esther Parnes leads her family east, away from the Polish village of Skalat. A step ahead of Hitler's earth-scorching troops, Esther and her children endure hunger, disease, and bloodshed. But Hitler's four-year campaign defeats neither Mother Russia nor Esther Parnes. In an era when women were confined to traditional household roles, at a time when proud men bowed their heads as they stood at the edge of a pit waiting to be shot, this redheaded woman challenged Adolf Hitler. Based on extensive interviews and independent research into the Parnes family's plight and the Nazi war on Russia, this book tells the story of an extraordinary mother's battle to save her seven children.

    While there, she reached out to the trapped Jewish families, going from door to door and asking the parents to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling them out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings.But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept secret lists buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On them were the names and true identities of those Jewish children, recorded with the hope that their relatives could find them after the war. She could not have known that more than ninety percent of their families would perish.

    Villagers lied, covered up, procrastinated and concealed, but most importantly they welcomed. This is the story of an isolated community in the upper reaches of the Loire Valley that conspired to save the lives of 3,500 Jews under the noses of the Germans and the soldiers of Vichy France. It is the story of a pacifist Protestant pastor who broke laws and defied orders to protect the lives of total strangers. It is the story of an eighteen-year-old Jewish boy from Nice who forged 5,000 sets of false identity papers to save other Jews and French Resistance fighters from the Nazi concentration camps. And it is the story of a community of good men and women who offered sanctuary, kindness, solidarity and hospitality to people in desperate need, knowing full well the consequences to themselves. Powerful and richly told, A Good Place to Hide speaks to the goodness and courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

    As Helga witnessed Nazi brutality toward her friends and neighbors and eventually her own family she began documenting her experiences in a diary. In 1941, Helga and her parents were sent to the concentration camp of Terezin, where she continued to write with astonishing insight about her daily life. Before she was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, Helga's uncle, who worked in the Terezin records department, hid her diary and drawings in a brick wall. Miraculously, he was able to reclaim it for her after the war. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezin and deported to Auschwitz, Helga was one of only 100 survivors. Written in school exercise books and translated here for the first time, Helga's Diary is a strikingly immediate and exceptional firsthand account of the Holocaust.

    Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story - complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.

    In this remarkable narrative, the life of Auschwitz's Angel of Death is told in counterpoint to the lives of the survivors, who until now have kept silent about their heinous death-camp ordeals.

    A dark shadow is about to fall over the golden cupolas of Kiev…As the Red Army retreats in the face of Hitler’s relentless advance across Eastern Europe, the lives of sisters Natasha and Lisa are about to change forever.While Lisa’s plans to marry her childhood sweetheart turn to tragedy under the occupation, Natasha grows close to Mark, a Hungarian soldier, enlisted against all his principles on the side of the Nazis.But as Natasha fights for the survival of the friends and family she loves, the war threatens to tear them apart.Sisters of War is a powerful tale of love, loss, and the power of hope set in Kiev during the Second World War.

    Dedicated to the American Seventh Army, this work originally appeared in Polish in an edition of 10,000 numbered copies, unspecified numbers of which were bound in material cut from concentration camp stripes and from SS uniforms.The inspiration for writing a book which could tell the truth about Auschwitz came from the conditions in immediately-post-war Munich in which the authors found themselves, and was articulated by Janusz Nel Siedlecki in his 1994 memoir, Beyond Lost Dreams: "As the one common enemy disappeared, so vanished all moral rules and restraints. Individuals, as well as large groups, competed for food, recognition, and a better life. The polish people were divided into innumberable factions .... The survivors carried forth their banners of "martyrdom" and sowed the seeds of future legends. They wanted glory -- I wanted to bear witness for the tortured, gassed, burnt; for all the unknown, unnamed, already forgotten dead."The publication history of We Were in Auschwitz reflects both the physical chaos that followed the end of the war in Europe and the political situation in Poland and in the U.S. Having written the book in their requisitioned apartment in Munich, the authors neededAmerican permission to publish it. "There was no printing without an official permit, and no permit for anything unessential, " Siedlecki wrote in Beyond Lost Dreams, "Cigarettes opened the gates of Bruckmann, the famous printers of Munich. My crude camp-German clinched the deal at pre-war prices."According the Siedlecki, the book immediately met with mixed reaction: "Praise from the Polish Western press, but, for debunking the 'heroes, ' vicious threats from many ex-prisoners." Meanwhile, the group of authors started to disperse. Tadeusz Borowski returned to Poland in May 1946; Krystyn Olszewski also returned to Poland, while Siedlecki emigrated to England. Anatol Girs left Munich for the U.S. in 1947, bringing with him the remaining copies of the book with high hopes of selling them to the Polish-American community. However, this immigrant community was hostile to Borowski's association with the communist regime on his return to Poland. Unable to pay the cost of storing the copies he had brought, Girs was forced to destroy most of them, keeping only a few.

    A highly original, provocative first novel that offers a chilling look into the complex power struggle between a Nazi kommandant and the stunningly beautiful Jewish prisoner he forces to live as his mistress.

    When Heshel Rosenheim, apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, hands his son, Michael, a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins–one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to an improbable love story during the battle for Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. The journals, which seem to tell the story of Heshel’s life, are so harrowing, so riveting, so passionate, and so perplexing that Michael becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his father. As Michael struggles to come to grips with his father’s elusive past, a world of complex and disturbing possibilities opens up to him–a world in which an accomplice to genocide may have turned into a virtuous Jew and a young man cannot recall murdering the person he loves most; a world in which truth is fiction and fiction is truth and one man’s terrible–or triumphant–transformation calls history itself into question. Michael must then solve the biggest riddle of all: Who am I?Intense, vivid, funny, and entirely original, Not Me is an unsparing and unforgettable examination of faith, history, identity, and love.From the Hardcover edition.

    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.

    In The Righteous, distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert, through extensive interviews, explores the courage of those who-throughout Germany and in every occupied country from Norway to Greece, from the Atlantic to the Baltic-took incredible risks to help Jews whose fate would have been sealed without them. Indeed, many lost their lives for their efforts.Those who hid Jews included priests, nurses, teachers, neighbors and friends, employees and colleagues, soldiers and diplomats, and, above all, ordinary citizens. From Greek Orthodox Princess Alice of Greece, who hid Jews in her home in Athens, to the Ukrainian Uniate Archbishop of Lvov, who hid hundreds of Jews in his churches and monasteries, to Muslims in Bosnia and Albania, many risked, and lost, everything to help their fellow man.

    This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.