Based on the wartime diaries of the author’s father, the novel tells the story of Tholdi, a 16-year-old Jewish boy living in Czernowitz—now known as Chernivtsi in Ukraine—during WWII. Tholdi is a musical prodigy who wants to become a conductor, but the year is 1941, and he and his family are forced into the Czernowitz ghetto. After two weeks in appalling conditions, they manage to bribe their way out as ‘skilled Jews’ and Tholdi gets a job at a weaving mill. However, before long he learns that the two brothers in charge are Nazi collaborators who are receiving a hefty commission for herding Jews onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. Thanks to a chance encounter with a Romanian ‘gypsy’, Tholdi devises a way to save himself and his family—but it comes at a cost, especially to his integrity. This book is a fascinating retelling of true events, painting a vivid picture of Czernowitz and what is often called the forgotten Holocaust in Transnistria. Rick Held’s experience as a television screenwriter and editor shows in the fast pacing of the narrative, which will also appeal to anyone who enjoys well-developed historical writing.

     First published in 1988, each experience of the ‘journey back from hell’ is unique, and readers are free to draw their own conclusions from what the survivors tell them. But the combined effect of the stories is so poignant and important to the core experience of the 20th century that nobody can afford to turn away — or to forget. ‘Brilliant, compelling...an inspiration’ – Mail on Sunday ‘Excellent’ – Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph Anton Gill has been a freelance writer since 1984, specialising in European contemporary history but latterly branching out into historical fiction. He is the winner of the H H Wingate Award for non-fiction for ‘The Journey Back From Hell’. He is also the author of ‘Into Darkness’, ‘Dance Between the Flames’ and ‘An Honourable Defeat’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Another woman took him in, at risk to herself. Viviane Renaud is a young mother living on the French Riviera in the Second World War. Times are hard but she is not the sort to be dismayed by circumstances. One day her life changes forever. A young Jewish woman, fleeing from the authorities, begs her to take care of her four year old boy, David. Almost without thinking, Viviane agrees. Viviane’s life is never the same again. She fabricates a story to explain how David came to be with her and must tip-toe around the suspicions of her neighbours, her friends and most of all her mother and sister. She and her husband, Alain, find allies in unlikely places, particularly an American woman, Dorothy Pine. But then, the world crashes around them. Threatened by Allied military success, Hitler sends the German army to occupy the south of France. With them come the SS and the Gestapo. The peril for Jews and for those, like Viviane, who hide them, appears overwhelming. The challenge for them now is to survive.

    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.

    Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene’s father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler’s Germany.By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene tends her ailing parents, cares for starving kids, and even helps bring clothes to her Amsterdam neighbor Anne Frank, before her family is offered a singular chance for freedom…providing the Nazi doctor says they are healthy enough. After two weeks of heart-lifting miracles and heart-breaking tragedies, Irene arrives in the Algerian desert to journey into redemption and womanhood, without her parents or brother.Irene’s first person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times. Irene’s hard-earned lessons are a timeless inspiration.

    The perimeter of the massive Saigon Airbase, Tan Son Nhut, was breached, and fighting raged all morning. Both gritty and intimate, From Chicago to Vietnam tells the powerful story of the ensuing epic battle, the Tet Offensive, from the perspective of one brave American soldier, Michael Duffy, whose life, like so many others, would forever be changed.Duffy's war experience begins when he exits a C-130 cargo plane onto the Tan Son Nhut tarmac--a chaotic scene of blasts, explosions, and small arms fire. Sprinting to a waiting helicopter, he is lifted up and over the city, where he gets a bird's-eye view of Saigon under attack. The helicopter lands on a road outside Bien Hoa Base Camp, and Duffy crawls in under enemy fire, tumbling into a fox-hole under cover of two GIs. Later, he meets up with his younger brother, Danny Duffy, in an ammunition convoy driving up Highway 1 to the village of Xuan Loc.After his brutal one-year tour in Vietnam, Duffy returns to Chicago, where he enjoys a Christmas dinner with his family before enrolling as a freshman at Colorado College. Like many vets, his return from the war would be met with curiosity, indifference, and, at times, scorn. This harrowing memoir was thirty years in the making.

    At first it was made up of small, disorganized groups of men and women working in isolation. But by the time of the liberation of France in 1944 around 400,000 French citizens (nearly 2% of the population) were involved. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up by Winston Churchill in 1941 saw its role in France as recruiting and organising guerilla fighters; supplying and training them; and disrupting the invaders by any means, including sabotage, the collection of intelligence and the dissemination of black propaganda designed to demoralise the Germans. The aim of this work was the eventual invasion of Europe by the Allied forces and the liberation of France. As described in Sebastian Faulks’ bestselling book Charlotte Gray, women would play a major role in SOE activities over the coming years of the war, and those in charge of SOE in London believed it necessary and vital to deploy operatives who could speak French and were adept at espionage. The basic SOE unit was a team of three: a leader, a wireless operator and a courier. These teams operated in Resistance circuits and the agents were given random codenames. Now, for the first time, we shed light on what life was really like for these brave women who infiltrated France by moonlight to help bring the downfall of the Nazis. From their selection and training; dropping into Occupied France, their attempts to survive on a day-to-day basis whilst being hunted by the dreaded German Gestapo; to the actions and ultimate achievements of these key women. Some survived by luck through the war, whilst others would be captured, tortured and executed before the Nazis final capitulation. Their stories only coming to light thanks to the dogged detective work of the commanding officer who had sent them on their missions and her determination to find out what happened to her girls.

    Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

     As the Germans closed in on the Allies, trapping them on the beaches of Dunkirk, it seemed the entire British army would be obliterated. Such a loss would almost certainly force the British to surrender and allow a Nazi invasion of the UK. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay planned a mass evacuation across the English Channel, but with the Germans drawing ever closer and intense air raids from the Luftwaffe, escape seemed all but impossible. But with a combination of excellent planning, luck, and an almost inconceivable bit of help from none other than Adolf Hitler himself, Operation Dynamo was underway. Over 900 boats sailed to Dunkirk - including destroyers, ferries, fishing boats and the famous “little boats of Dunkirk” – and, across nine tense days, rescued 338,226 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in what remains the biggest evacuation in military history. This brilliantly researched book by historian David Boyle recounts each fraught day of the famous rescue mission that Winston Churchill famously called a ‘miracle of deliverance’. Praise for David Boyle 'A wonderfully elegant and pithy reappraisal of the “miracle” that saved Britain' Saul David ‘Exhilarating’ - Daily Mail David Boyle is a British author and journalist who writes mainly about history and new ideas in economics, money, business and culture. He lives in Crystal Palace, London. His books include ‘Unheard Unseen: Warfare in the Dardanelles’, ‘Towards the Setting Sun: The Race for America’ and ‘The Age to Come’.

    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.

    Petersburg for accompanying her husband Alexander on shooting and riding trips and for being outstandingly accurate with her gun. She was the daughter of a high-ranking Russian diplomat, and the mother of three young sons, destined to join the social and intellectual elite of imperial Russia. The Revolution of 1917 changed the course of these lives. By December 1918 her husband was dead, her children separated from her by the closing of the frontiers, and her own life was in danger. This is her account of how she faced these traumatic events, revealing the courage and determination she had shown in earlier times that helped her endure hunger, imprisonment, and loneliness. Her reunion with her sons in 1921 makes the months of danger and deprivation worthwhile. Illustrated with original family photographs this account will interest the serious academic and general reader alike.

    With the onset of World War II, her life is carried by a swirl of atrocities, decisions, farewells and remorse that will scar her forever. A stirring historical drama about the life of a Jewish family during WW II. This is the story of one unforgettable woman, supporting her husband and children under impossible conditions. It is also the story of a Jewish family who feels safe from war because of its status and wealth, and wakes up to a disastrous reality. More than anything, it is the story of the entire Italian Jewish community in face of the Holocaust – a story of disaster, overcoming and eventual immigration to Israel as a part of the Zionist movement. Behind every successful man stands an insightful woman. Daily life soaked in historical consequences, family ties and general atmosphere, aromas, sounds and tastes, based on thorough research, interviews and original historical manuscripts. A drama of loss and despair, survival and human triumph with unforgettable characters that stay with you long after the last page. Scroll up to grab your copy of Vittoria now!

    It makes visceral the fear, the filth, and the cold that were his constant companions. Kafak is a reluctant hero who intentionally pisses off the brass to avoid promotion because he has seen too many of his commanding officers get blown to pieces and he doesn’t want to be next. He fights from the beaches of Anzio in Italy and battles up through the South of France toward Germany, facing one terrible heart-pounding encounter after another. Seen through Kafak’s thick-lensed army-issued glasses, the wider implications of the war remain blurry while he focuses on the simple, urgent needs of survival: keep your head down, keep your feet dry, gain the next six feet of ground, and concentrate on what tomorrow will bring.

    But when they did arrive, their orders were to put the “Final Solution” into effect with deliberate speed. Soros, a Jewish lawyer in Budapest, secured fake Christian identities for himself, his wife, and his two sons following the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944. In a narrative reminiscent of the great Primo Levi, Soros recounts his experiences with a beguiling humor, deep humanity, and a wisdom that is humbling. Superbly translated by Humphrey Tonkin, Masquerade is a unique account of how one man managed not only to survive but to retain his integrity, compassion, family unity, and humor by “dancing around death.” Like Klemperer’s Diary of the Nazi Years, this very personal, low-key testament of the Holocaust is a gripping depiction of “normal” daily life under the Nazis—told by a man who triumphed by leading an ordinary life under extraordinary and terrifying circumstances.

    The story of these men is unrecognized, submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps.From all countries and of all ages, the priests were gathered behind the barbed wire of Dachau according to an agreement wrested from the Reich by Vatican diplomacy. For eight years, both tragedies and magnificent gestures punctuated the journey of the clergy at Dachau, from the terrifying forced march of -Holy Week- in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of priests in the barracks of those dying of typhoid, to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Never in the course of history have so many priests, monks and seminarians been murdered in such a small area: 1,034 lost their lives.Beyond the personal journeys of which it is composed, the history of the priests at Dachau sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps, on the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism and, beyond the strictly historical perspective, on faith and spiritual commitment. This book deals with many questions about the priest barracks, including:How does the experience of the priests at Dachau compare to those who were laymen? What were their privileges and what were their particular sufferings? Did the Nazi persecution against the clergy have ideological or political underpinnings? Did the faith and religious commitment of the priests reinforce them against the methodical dehumanization in the camps? Were their moral convictions, forged by the Gospel and the tradition of the Church, able to resist the perversion of values imposed by the SS? Did the sufferings endured by the priests at Dachau bear fruit within the ecclesiastical institution and also outside, at the peripheries of the Church?In Guillaume Zeller's recounting of this strange story, this fragment of the tragedy of the concentration camps allows us to learn answers to these and other intriguing questions.