Their B-17 is shot down and the airmen—stumbling through fields and villages—scatter across Europe. Some struggled to flee for safety. Others were captured immediately and imprisoned. Now, for the first time, their incredible story of grit, survival, and reunion is told. In 1944, George Starks was just a nineteen-year-old kid from Florida when he and his high school buddies enlisted in the US military. They wanted to join the action of WWII. George was assigned to the 92nd Bomb Group—in which the median age was 22—and on his crew’s first bombing mission together received the most vulnerable spot of a B-17 mission configuration: low squadron, low group, flying #6 in the bomber box formation. Airmen called George’s position the “Coffin Corner” because here exposure was most likely to draw hostile fire. Sure enough, George’s plane was shot down by a German Fw190, and he jumped at 25,000 feet for the “first and only time,” as he tells the story. He landed near Vitry-le-Perthois to begin a 300-mile trek through the dangers of war-torn France towards the freedom of neutral Switzerland. Through waist-deep snow, seering exhaustion, and close encounters with Nazis, George repeated to himself the mantra “just one more day.” He battled to keep walking. His comrades were scattered all across Europe and experienced places as formidable as German POW camps and as hospitable as Spain, each crew member always wondering about the fate of the others. After the war, George made two vows: he would never lose touch with his men again and one day would attempt to thank those who had risked their lives to save his. Despite passage of time and demands of career and family, he accomplished both. He reunited with his crew then twenty-five years later returned to France to locate as many of the brave souls who had helped him evade the enemy as he could. Join George as he retraces his steps to freedom and discover the amazing stories of sacrifice and survival and how ten young American boys plus their French Helpers became heroes.

    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.

    Though German Jews, they are embraced by their Italian neighbors, and for the next several years, the pensione flourishes and becomes their perch to observe the world’s events. Travelers from across Europe and America come to their door, each with their own story, mystery, or surprise. Nearly all have been touched in some way by the ominous changes occurring to the north, in Nazi-controlled Germany.When war breaks out in Europe and Italy sides with Germany, Elsa and her family’s fears are quickly realized. The growing sense that the atrocities in German-occupied lands will soon occur in Italy forces them to sell their pensione and attempt a desperate journey to safety in America. The way seems impossible. Day by day, war makes travel increasingly difficult as countries begin closing their doors to refugees.Told in Elsa’s words and written by her grandson, One More Moon is the extraordinary story of a woman and her family’s often harrowing experiences in the years before and during World War II.

    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.

    After dying her hair blonde and studying the catechism in hopes of passing as Christian Poles, Berta, her mother, and her sister live a life of constant vigilance and fear. It is only through her abiding faith in a higher power that she is enabled to survive while hiding in plain sight.

    Grove. Photos throughout.

    It is the story of a girl who, at the age of six, witnesses a murder being committed by German Storm Troopers. From that moment, the happy life she has known disintegrates. Her family escapes to Prague, where they create a new life. Six years later, the Germans march into Prague. Now she has to escape to England alone and on foot. She walks across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains. By train, fishing boat, and ship, she finally manages to get to England. She comes of age there during the bombing of London. When the war ends, she immediately returns to the Continent to discover the fate of her family. Farewell to Prague is a gripping true story that will fascinate and inspire readers of all ages.

    His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews#58; the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." middot; Sir Martin Gilbertbrbr"Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. [...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." middot; [From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett]brbrTogether with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing,however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return.brbrEwald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

    In the following twenty-three years she experienced many of the terrors of her fellowEuropean Jews: early Nazi oppression in Berlin; post-"Anschluss" Vienna; Nazi occupied Prague; and deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the truehorrors of the Nazi "Final Solution" awaited her in Birkenau, the woman's concentration camp where she survived her internment, beginning in January, 1943, for two years. These months of hell were followed by a "Death March" and incarceration in Ravensbrück from which she and a group of fellow inmates walked away to freedom.As Professor Emerita in German literature at UNC-Charlotte, Dr. Cernyak-Spatz continues to teach and to lecture about the Holocaust. This book is a rare firsthand testament of a Holocaust survivor. The audiobook version, narrated by the author, is now available on her website.

    Who was this enigmatic officer Pearl Good had spoken of so often?After five years of research--interviewing survivors, assembling a team that could work to open German files untouched for fifty years, following every lead he could, Good was able to uncover the amazing tale of one man's remarkable courage. And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a "Righteous among Nations," honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge--especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge's unit. His testimony is now part of this growing witness to truth.

    Benjamin Katz and his frightened family stand at the train station in occupied Holland, unsure if they would be taken to their freedom—or the death camp. Sylvie, his granddaughter, who was six years old at the time, would later recall the madness as they wondered if their desperate last minute escape would work. When the German officer received the order to allow the escape he said, “I would have much rather been given the order to kill all of you.”Their entire art collection had long made them a prime target of Adolf Hitler and his greedy henchmen. Now they had one big trade—a Rembrandt in exchange for twenty-five lives.Based on a true story, Rembrandt’s Shadow is the story of two women from different generations—each with their own distinct horrific memories—who find themselves at odds when forced to confront the here and now.

    With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. The author takes the reader back in time as he reveals in vivid and engrossing details the painful memories of life in his childhood town during Nazi occupation, the forced march before his jeering and cold-eyed former friends and neighbors as they are driven from their homes into the crowded and terrible conditions in the Rzeszow ghetto, and the heart-wrenching memory of his final farewell as he is separated from his parents who would be sent in boxcars to the Belzec extermination camp. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France. In Płaszów he digs up graves with his bare hands, in Flossenbürg he labors in a stone quarry and in France he works as a prisoner in a secret tunnel the Nazis have converted into an armaments factory. In every concentration camp including Sachsenhausen, Braunschweig, Ravensbrück and others, George recounts the agonizing and excruciating details of what it was like to barely survive the rollcalls, selections, beatings, hunger, and despair he both endured and witnessed. Of the 465 Jewish prisoners with him in the labor group in the Rzeszów ghetto in 1942, less than fifty were alive three years later when the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberated the Wobbelin concentration camp on the afternoon of May 2, 1945. George recalls not only the painful details of his survival, but also the tales of his fellow prisoners, a small group who became more than friends as they shared their meager rations, their fragile strength, and their waning hope. The memoir moves us as we behold the life sustaining powers of friendship among this band of young prisoners. With gratitude for his courageous liberators, Salton expresses his powerful emotions as he acknowledges his miraculous freedom: "I felt something stir deep within my soul. It was my true self, the one who had stayed deep within and had not forgotten how to love and how to cry, the one who had chosen life and was still standing when the last roll call ended.”

    This book is an authorized translation of the original book that was written in Croatian in 1966. What follows was written by the original publisher. There is no stronger or more reliable material than the one that is born from one’s own experience. Eyewitnesses and direct participants provide us with not only the facts, but also that sublimely human spirit common to all happenings in which people participate. It doesn’t matter that this account is about the fear that the people of Jasenovac experienced, or about the deeds of their torturers. For every one hundred thousand people in the Jasenovac camp during its horrifying four-year existence, there was only one—literally one—who survived. Those were the odds in the balance of life and death: one hundred thousand dead and one alive. And there is a witness, right in front of us, who found the strength to reminisce, to go back to the place of his torture, to break the psychological barriers, and to lead us step by step through his nightmare, through waves of terror that exceed every notion of horror. From the beginning of his time at Jasenovac to the end, Egon Berger was witness—and victim—to a rampage without limit. Of those who survived, he is the only one who told the story. Berger does not bring us a literary masterpiece—he brings us only the experience, a story about forty-four months of his life in a camp, told simply. A story is enough—a story that calls images to mind and makes us tremble with the thought, “Are such things possible?” For myself and every person who had been to Jasenovac and lived, it is a miracle that we survived. Yes, it is possible, it is real, and it is true. A terror arose in front of us from the oblivion. It should not be forgotten. Share this record with future generations who will hopefully not know such terror. Ivo Frol, 1966

    He devised survival strategies—stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the like—that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

    But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she found herself swept up in a flood of startling revelations from her mother's earlier life. As she pored through old photographs and documents, she began to ask questions about secrets and omissions. The answers she found both shocked and inspired her, and would irrevocably transform her view of her mother, herself, and the meaning of family legacy.From Berkeley, California to New York City, to Leipzig, Germany, this compelling memoir takes you across continents and lifetimes."The Woman in the Photograph" will make you wonder about the men and women in your own photographs and how your life has been shaped by events you know little about.