The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of Elizebeth Smith who played an integral role in our nation's history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma--and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.Fagone unveils America's code-breaking history through the prism of Smith's life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence.

    He joined the Luftwaffe at the outbreak of the war, rose to the rank of commanding officer, and received the Knight’s Cross. Knoke’s account crackles with vivid accounts of air battles; and captures his utter desolation at Germany’s defeat.

     A paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, James Sheeran was just a kid when he floated into Normandy on D-Day-only to be captured soon afterward by the Germans. Escaping from a POW train bound for Germany, Sheeran traveled behind enemy lines in France, eventually fighting alongside the French Resistance. After hooking up with Patton's advancing army, he fought admirably in Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, and was ultimately awarded the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and the Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor. Sheeran's breathtaking chronicle of his capture, daring escape, fierce guerilla resistance, and valor under fire is an unforgettable testament to the spirit of the American soldier.

    They were the men of the now-legendary Easy Company. After almost two years of hard training, they parachuted into Normandy on DDay and, later, Operation Market Garden. They fought their way through Belgium, France, and Germany, survived overwhelming odds, liberated concentration camps, and drank a victory toast in April 1945 at Hitler's hideout in the Alps. Here, revealed for the first time, are stories of war, sacrifice, and courage as experienced by one of the most revered combat units in military history. In We Who Are Alive and Remain, twenty men who were there and are alive today-and the families of three deceased others-recount the horrors and the victories, the bonds they made, the tears and blood they shed...and the brothers they lost.

    This story begins when Daniel Baldinger divorces the wife he loves because she cannot bear children. Believing that "a man must have sons to say Kaddish for him when he dies," he marries a much younger woman, and by 1913, Daniel and his second wife Lieba have eleven children, including six sons. In this richly textured portrait, Armstrong follows the Baldinger children's lives over decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust, to the present. Based on oral histories and the diaries of more than a dozen men and women, Mosaic is an extraordinary story of a family and one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.

    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.

    When innocent people are brought into that war because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it becomes incomprehensible. Java, 1942, was such a place and time, and we were those innocent people.”Fifty years after the end of World War II, Clara Olink Kelly sat down to write a memoir that is both a fierce and enduring testament to a mother’s courage and a poignant record of an often overlooked chapter of the war.As the fighting in the Pacific spread, four-year-old Clara Olink and her family found their tranquil, pampered lives on the beautiful island of Java torn apart by the invasion of Japanese troops. Clara’s father was taken away, forced to work on the Burma railroad. For Clara, her mother, and her two brothers, the younger one only six weeks old, an insistent knock on the door ended all hope of escaping internment in a concentration camp. For nearly four years, they endured starvation, filth-ridden living conditions, sickness, and the danger of violence from their prison guards. Clara credits her mother with their survival: Even in the most perilous of situations, Clara’s mother never compromised her beliefs, never admitted defeat, and never lost her courage. Her resilience sustained her three children through their frightening years in the camp.Told through the eyes of a young Clara, who was eight at the end of her family’s ordeal, The Flamboya Tree portrays her mother’s tenacity, the power of hope and humor, and the buoyancy of a child’s spirit. A painting of a flamboya tree—a treasured possession of the family’s former life—miraculously survived the surprise searches by the often brutal Japanese soldiers and every last-minute flight. Just as her mother carried this painting through the years of imprisonment and the life that followed, so Clara carries her mother’s unvanquished spirit through all of her experiences and into the reader’s heart.

    It was to this impregnable fortress that the Germans sent all those prisoners who persisted in escaping from other camps, such as Stalag Luft III (of THE GREAT ESCAPE FAME). Once within the walls of Colditz, the Germans reasoned, escape was impossible. And yet during the four-year period when the castle was used as a prison over 300 men escaped, 31 of whom managed to complete the hazardous journey home through Germany. Prisoners from 10 different countries formed a truly international escape academy. Skeleton keys were made, German passes forged, maps drafted, and all manner of tools and machinery constructed out of whatever the prisoners had to hand. The ingenuity of the escape artists knew no bounds: they tried everything from tunnelling, to hiding in rubbish sacks, disguising themselves as German officers, and leaping acrobatically from the castle walls.

    A little cobbled street in a smoky mill town in the North of England has haunted me for the greater part of my life. It was inevitable that I should write about it and the people who lived on both sides of its "Invisible Wall." The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was seemingly unremarkable. It was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the "invisible wall" that ran down its center, dividing Jewish families on one side from Christian families on the other. Only a few feet of cobblestones separated Jews from Gentiles, but socially, it they were miles apart.On the eve of World War I, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. His father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. Harry's mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams: new shoes that might secure Harry's admission to a fancy school; that her daughter might marry the local rabbi; that the entire family might one day be whisked off to the paradise of America.Then Harry's older sister, Lily, does the unthinkable: She falls in love with Arthur, a Christian boy from across the street. When Harry unwittingly discovers their secret affair, he must choose between the morals he's been taught all his life, his loyalty to his selfless mother, and what he knows to be true in his own heart.A wonderfully charming memoir written when the author was ninety-three, The Invisible Wall vibrantly brings to life an all-but-forgotten time and place. It is a moving tale of working-class life, and of the boundaries that can be overcome by love.

    We must find and destroy her."This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization deemed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France.Virginia Hall was one of the greatest spies in American history, yet her story remains untold. Just as she did in Clementine, Sonia Purnell uncovers the captivating story of a powerful, influential, yet shockingly overlooked heroine of the Second World War. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Virginia Hall came to be known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," coordinating a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped with her life in a grueling hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates all imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had "more lives to save," she dove back in as soon as she could, organizing forces to sabotage enemy lines and back up Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. Told with Purnell's signature insight and novelistic flare, A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.

    It's the story of real people in war-friends and thieves, dreamers and killers, jokers and heroes-as well as the personal account of a young American plucked from a sheltered and comfortable life and sent to a foreign land to save the men fighting to save the world. Few books have portrayed the grit and wonder of war with such eloquence, and still fewer have shown how war looks through the eyes of a soldier whose mission was saving lives, not taking them.

    When a Nazi death squad raided his village at the outset of World War II, Jewish five-year-old Alex Kurzem escaped. After surviving the Russian winter by foraging for food and stealing clothes off dead soldiers, he was discovered by a Nazi-led Latvian police brigade that later became an SS unit. Not knowing he was Jewish, they made him their mascot, dressing the little ?corporal? in uniform and toting him from massacre to massacre. Terrified, the resourceful Alex charmed the highest echelons of the Latvian Third Reich, eventually starring in a Nazi propaganda film. When the war ended he was sent to Australia with a family of Latvian refugees. Fearful of being discovered?as either a Jew or a Nazi?Alex kept the secret of his childhood, even from his loving wife and children. But he grew increasingly tormented and became determined to uncover his Jewish roots and the story of his past. Shunned by a local Holocaust organization, he reached out to his son Mark for help in reclaiming his identity. A survival story, a grim fairy-tale, and a psychological drama, this remarkable memoir asks provocative questions about identity, complicity, and forgiveness.

    He lies in one position for days, barely twitching a muscle, able to control his heartbeat and breathing. His record has never been matched: 93 confirmed kills. This is the story of Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, Marine sniper, legend of military lore.

    In this shocking and hauntingly beautiful book, historian Childers paints an entirely new picture of the aftermath of World War II in America.

    In this first-hand account of the Revolutionary War, Joseph Plumb Martin narrates his true adventures as an eighteen-year-old private in the Continental Army -- and gives a rare glimpse of the earthy beginnings of our nation's history.