Within are some of the most senior officers of the Allied army, guarded by almost two hundred Italian soldiers and a vicious fascist commando who answers directly to "Il Duce" Mussolini himself. Their unbelievable escape, told by Mark Felton in Castle of the Eagles, is a little-known marvel of World War II.By March 1943, the plan is ready: this extraordinary assemblage of middle-aged POWs has crafted civilian clothes, forged identity papers, gathered rations, and even constructed dummies to place in their beds, all in preparation for the moment they step into the tunnel they have been digging for six months.How they got to this point and what happens after is a story that reads like fiction, supported by an eccentric cast of characters, but is nonetheless true to its core.

    Asked about her experience during the war, Helga quietly revealed she had been a "Jugend," a member of Hitler's child army, "trained to revere and obey the Fuhrer." When Riehl asked how children were recruited, she replied, "Clever seduction." Helga's seduction begins with an invitation from Hitler she cannot refuse. The ten-year-old is ordered to attend weekly meetings of the Hitler Youth movement. Lies and tasty treats are employed to entice her allegiance to the Fuhrer. Helga is sent away to Hitler Youth training camps as the war draws nearer her home in Berlin. She is caught between loyalty to her family, suffering under Nazi rule, and loyalty to the Fuhrer, who keeps her safe and well-fed. Helga's gradual disillusionment, followed by her harrowing escape home, is a powerful coming-of-age story of a young girl's survival of Nazi mind control.

    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.

    Bloc Life collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals a rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption. In fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as 'perfectly ordinary' and even hanker for the 'security' that it offered.From political leaders, athletes and pop stars, to cooks, miners and cosmonauts, the stories collected in Bloc Life evoke the moods, preoccupations and experiences of a world that vanished almost overnight.

    Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

    It must have been at this moment that I thought I was going to die because I became remarkably calm.’ Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber, 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancée back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the twenty-one year old was thrown clear of his disintegrating aeroplane and found himself parachuting into the heart of Nazi Germany. He was soon to be captured and began his period as a prisoner of war.This engaging and compulsively readable true-life account of a Second World War airman, who cheated death in the sky, only to face interrogation and the prospect of being shot by the Gestapo, before having to endure months of hardship as a prisoner of war.

    But when the Germans and Ukrainians obliterated David-Horodok in 1941, killing off all Jewish men in the town, everything changed.Left to fend for themselves, Basia and her mother fled 100 kilometers south, driven into the infamous Sarny ghetto. Tragedy struck again as the Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1942, and Basia went into the first of many hiding places. After years of running from soldiers, changing her identity, and hiding her faith, Basia emerged as a survivor – shepherding the rebirth of her faith and her family in America.

    His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. “You must have a future,” his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye.As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid—he lived in constant fear that he and his family would be found and killed. However, even in Hitler-ruled Nazi Germany, there were plenty of people who refused to cower to absolute evil and who did everything they could to usher families like Stoessinger’s to freedom.In From Holocaust to Harvard, Stoessinger recalls heartbreaking moments from his childhood and of living a life of secrets in Shanghai. He then presents the second part of his story—the part where he attempts to untangle himself from his previous life and devastating memories and is able to relocate to America, earn a graduate-level degree from a prestigious university, and later become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations despite making a decision that nearly lands him in prison and threatens his hard-earned freedom.Throughout his story, Stoessinger expresses his gratitude to those who helped him through the toughest parts of this life and put him on a path that led him to a Harvard education, a successful career, and inner peace.

    

    It proposes answers to such questions as “Why were the Allies unprepared?”, “Why did France collapse so quickly?”, “Why didn’t the British government accept Hitler’s peace proposals?” and “Why did the Germans allow Hitler to obtain life and death control over them?”But the book’s main purpose is to provide an account of Winston Churchill’s actions and their intended consequences – as well as some of the unintended ones – for readers who are unlikely to read a military history book of 800 pages. The author has pared down the details of this at once fascinating and frightening story to an accessible length of how the world nearly ended in the 1940s. How Churchill Saved Civilization was written in honor of all those who sacrificed their lives in the War, and to caution readers that it could very easily happen again, as key factors like complacency, ignorance, and weakness continue to play a role in international diplomacy.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    22483, who had been shipped from Belgium to Buchenwald. It records what he saw and felt during his calvary from Antwerp to the Malin distribution camp in France and from there to the extermination camp of Buchenwald. He was one of the few people who both entered a Nazi concentration camp and left again. This is his remarkable personal story that records his experiences of one of the most harrowing events in human history. Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the first and largest camps to be built on German soil and during the years that Weinstock spent there he kept company with other Jews, Poles, Slavs, political prisoners and many other men and women that the Nazi’s deemed subhuman. “A mere number, he had the strength to remain a man, an artist of the word, observing his captors, his fellow-prisoners, life in the shadow of death. … . Throughout, the writing is poignant, vibrant with humanity, a cry “de profundis” and a vow that it must never happen again. This book should be long remembered.” — Emil Lengyel Eugene Weinstock was a Hungarian Jew who was living in Belgium at the beginning of the Second World War. Beyond the Last Path records his life during those terrible years up to the point when American troops released the remaining prisoners in Buchenwald. By this time Weinstock weighed a mere eighty pounds and had seen many of his good friends die. His work was first published in the United States in 1947 where he had gone to. He passed away in 1984.

    All 13 Jews ended up living in a 9?x12?x4? underground hole as World War II raged around them. Some lived underground for about seven months before being liberated by the Russian Army. Dr. Michael Berenbaum, project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (1988-1993) and author of The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, says, ?Izzy's Fire is filled with the passion of one woman determined to do justice to the story of another woman who lived in hiding throughout the war years. The war has soul. One feels the intensity of the struggle to survive. One senses the decency of those who were ready to rescue and the evil that haunted a mother and father and their young child in the dangerous world they lived......"

    The Germans called it Auschwitz. Auschwitz; a name now synonymous with man's darkest hour. Contrary to widespread belief, Auschwitz was not just a camp for those that the Third Reich deemed 'undesirables' - Jews, homosexuals and communists - hundreds of British Tommies were also incarcerated there and beheld the atrocities meted out by Hitler's brutal SS. This is the true story of one of those witnesses. Forced to do hard labour in an industrial factory, beaten by SS guards, part of a partisan group aiding in the plans for a mass breakout of Jewish prisoners. An escapee, a survivor; Arthur Dodd - a Spectator in Hell.

    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.

     It brings to life the dramatic experiences of a woman caught between a ruthless government and the will to survive with her children during the last six months of World War 2 in Nazi Germany as she flees the incoming Russian front in the East and right into the carpet bombing in the West. This book brings this war down to a human level in a way that will leave the reader with a stunning new perspective never told in America and represents the missing link in the historical annals of this time. A sequel called WEST WIND is being written at this time and deals with the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich and the survival of Elisabeth, her four children and Helga, the maid. It also describes her husband's experiences in an American prison camp in the south of France. Quote by Elisabeth Wendell, Professor of American Literature, University of Duesseldorf, Germany: “Barbara Martin is a very talented story teller and has captured a dark period of German history during the holocaust with sincere honesty and deep understanding for the people caught up in it. The book makes for great reading enjoyment!”