After Long Silence


Helen Fremont - 1999
    It wasn't until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish--Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth.Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.What Fremont and her sister discover is an astonishing story: one of Siberian gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. AFTER LONG SILENCE is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. -->

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers


Filip Müller - 1979
    He was still alive when the gassings ceased in November 1944. He saw millions come and disappear; by sheer luck he survived. Muller is neither a historian nor a psychologist; he is a source--one of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it. Eyewitness Auschwitz is one of the key documents of the Holocaust.

Kaputt


Curzio Malaparte - 1944
    Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved.Kaputt is an insider’s dispatch from the world of the enemy that is as hypnotically fascinating as it is disturbing.

Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz


Rena Kornreich Gelissen - 1995
    While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfill the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart--a promise to take care of her sister.One of the few Holocaust memoirs about the lives of women in the camps, Rena's Promise is a compelling story of the fleeting human connections that fostered determination and made survival a possibility. From the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters, to the links between prisoners, and even prisoners and guards, Rena's Promise reminds us of the humanity and hope that survives inordinate inhumanity.

The Nazis Knew My Name


Magda Hellinger - 2021
    The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in charge of the day-to-day accommodation blocks, they could deflect attention away from themselves. Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and put in charge of hundreds of women in the notorious Experimental Block 10. She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: saving lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS and risking execution. Through her inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers. Based on Magda’s personal account and completed by her daughter’s extensive research, this is “an unputdownable account of resilience and the power of compassion” (Booklist) in the face of indescribable evil.

The Last Jew of Rotterdam


Ernest Cassutto - 1974
    Journey with Ernest and Elisabeth from the horror of the Holocaust to salvation in Jesus the Messiah. Not only is this a powerful testimony of how God sustained several Jewish families during the worst nightmare of our time, it is also a tender love story. You won't be able to put it down!

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past


Jennifer Teege - 2013
    Millions of people worldwide know of him through Ralph Fiennes’ chilling portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Goeth was the brutal commandant of the Plaszów concentration camp—Oskar Schindler’s drinking buddy, and yet his adversary. Responsible for the deaths of thousands, Amon Goeth was hanged in 1946.Goeth’s partner Ruth, Teege’s much-loved grandmother, committed suicide in 1983. Teege is their daughter’s daughter; her father is Nigerian. Raised by foster parents, she grew up with no knowledge of the family secret. Now, it unsettles her profoundly. What can she say to her Jewish friends, or to her own children? Who is she—truly?My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me is Teege’s searing chronicle of grappling with her haunted past. Her research into her family takes her to Poland and to Israel. Award-winning journalist Nikola Sellmair supplies historical context in a separate, interwoven narrative. Step by step, horrified by her family’s dark history, Teege builds the story of her own liberation.

The Saga of Pappy Gunn


George Churchill Kenney - 2017
       “An affectionate biography of an almost legendary Air Force hero.” — Kirkus Reviews.

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness


Simon Wiesenthal - 1969
    Haunted by the crimes in which he'd participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--& obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion & justice, silence & truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?In this important book, 53 distinguished men & women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors & victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China & Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past. Often surprising, always thought provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion & responsibility.

Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story


Lila Perl - 1996
    “The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what’s said and in what is left out.”—ALA Booklist (starred review)Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family—father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert—were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps, including Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, before finally making it to the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.Four Perfect Pebbles features forty archival photographs, including several new to this edition, an epilogue, a bibliography, a map, a reading group guide, an index, and a new afterword by the author. First published in 1996, the book was an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and IRA Young Adults’ Choice, and a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and the recipient of many other honors. “A harrowing and often moving account.”—School Library Journal

Unfinished Symphony


Bernard Hellreich Ingram - 2012
    This is not a book about survival in a concentration camp. It is a book about "ordinary" people, maybe like you & me, on the peripheries of the Holocaust. It is a book about an ordinary man who is a young Polish Jewish doctor & it tells of the discrimination he faced leading up to WWII. It tells how his comfortable Polish middle class life is shattered first by the 1939 Soviet invasion showing the real face of the Stalinist regime & then by the Nazis in 1941 who are bent on exterminating a people merely because of their religious background. What to do? I ask myself how I would have reacted & I asked my father how he had the courage to choose to walk the line of a Jew hiding as a Christian. How brave was he? "Not brave at all" was his reply, "I just did what I had to do". It is also the story of two brave Christians, the doctor's girlfriend & a friend of hers, & how they chose to risk their lives & those of their families to prevent the unjust murder of another human being whose only crime was his ethnic background. I ask myself could I now do the same if this situation arose. The book is priced as low as possible to encourage people to read about an amazing account of survival through the love & selflessness of others in a very dark time of man's recent history. Two of the central figures of this book, Marian Golebiowski & Irena Szumska-Ingram have been honored by Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with the Righteous Among the Nations award. See the Yom Ha’atzmaut 2010 speech by Dor Shapira of the Israeli Embassy to the Sydney NSWJBD in relation to Irena Sumska's award: http://www.google.com.hk/url?sa=t&... It is a story of love, adventure & human values, the fugitive "Jew in a Christian skin", under constant threat of exposure, precariously maintaining his false identity in a tiny rural community. finally we see Hellreich the penniless refugee, still supported by his faithful Irena, rebuilding his shattered career in Australia - a chapter of heartbreaking difficulties & heartwarming satisfaction. "...as gripping and human a story as any told about this tragic period in the history of man's inhumanity to man. I couldn't put it down. That it is told without bitterness and rancour makes it all the more powerful ... simply yet eloquently written." - Barry Cohen (former Australian Minister for the Arts, Heritage and the Environment) "... incredible faith and courage ... one of the most amazing stories to emerge from the wreckage and despair of the Holocaust." - L E Freeman in The Newcastle Herald Publisher's Note: My father, the author, passed from this world of natural causes in 2008 after what he described as a very interesting life. My hope in publishing his story is to document what happened to one man during these dark times & let him tell his story to all of you & not let it die with him. My father did not speak of his war years until I was 8, after many requests. It took him a lot longer to agree to write his story for the public. He was a modest man & did not think his story on the Holocaust's edges would be of interest, as per his Preface. All the Holocaust books I have read are valuable not for their literary merit but for the story they tell of barbarism, heroism, selfless help by others while endangering their own lives, & the wonderful strength & purity of th

William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony


William Schiff - 2007
    In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, an experimental rabbit job, eyewitness accounts of cannibalism, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually candid view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people. the Germans occupy western Poland. A year later they marry in the ghetto; by 1942 deportations have wasted both families. After Rosalie is saved by Oskar Schindler, the husband and wife end up at the Plaszow work camp under Amon Goeth, the bestial commandant played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. ...

Out on a Ledge: Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond


Eva Libitzky - 2010
    Despite the deepest suffering and the most profound loss, Eva was able to rebuild her life, and with her husband, also a survivor, raise a family in America – in the city, suburbs, and on the farm. Lehrhaus is proud to publish the second edition, which includes Eva’s eventful return to Poland in 2013 with 16 of her closest relatives spanning three generations.

Moments of Reprieve


Primo Levi - 1981
    Levi was a master storyteller but he did not write fairytales. These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz, 'the ones in whom I had recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue'. Each centres on an individual who - whether it be through a juggling trick, a slice of apple or a letter - discovers one of the 'bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve'.The English edition includes just one section of the three originally published in Italian under the title 'Lilít', tales from the other two sections have been published in 'A Tranquil Star'.

Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling


Mark S. Smith - 2010
    Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, 50 years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation, discovered in his briefcase after his suicide, and reproduced here for the first time. Including previously unpublished photographs, this book traces the life of a man who survived five concentration camps, and details what he had to do to achieve this. Hershl's story, from his childhood in a small Polish town to the bridge in faraway Scotland, is testament to the lasting torment of those very few who survived the Nazis' most efficient and gruesome death factory. The author personally follows in his subject's footsteps from Klobuck, to Treblinka, to Glasgow.