Captured by the Nazis, she was sent to Auschwitz, and later, Bergen-Belsen. With unnerving clarity and an astonishing ability to find humor where only despair should prevail, the author charts her eleven months as one of "the orchestra girls"; writes of the loves, the laughter, hatreds, jealousies, and tensions that racked this privileged group whose only hope of survival was to make music.

    The very model of blond Aryan "purity," Irmgard sat on the Führer's knee for photographers, witnessed with excitement the comings and goings of all manner of famous personages, and with the blindness of a child accepted the Nazi doctrine that most of her family and everyone around her so eagerly embraced. Here, in a picture-postcard world untouched by the war and seemingly unblemished by the horrors Germany's master had wrought, she accepted the lies of her teachers and church and civic leaders, joined the Hitler Youth at age ten, and joyfully sang the songs extolling the virtues of National Socialism.But before the end -- when she and other children would be forced to cower in terror in dank bomb shelters and wartime deprivations would take a harrowing toll -- Irmgard's doubts about the "truths" she had been force-fed increased, fueled by the few brave souls who had not accepted Hitler and his abominations. After the fall of the brutal dictatorship and the suicide of its mad architect, many of her neighbors and loved ones still clung to their beliefs, prejudices, denial, and unacknowledged guilt. Irmgard, often feeling lonely in her quest, was determined to face the truth of her country's criminal past and to bear the responsibility for an almost unbearable reality that most of her elders were determined to forget. She resolved even then that the lessons of her youth would guide her actions and steel her commitment to defend the freedoms and democratic values that had been so easily dismissed by the German people.Provocative and astonishing, Irmgard A. Hunt's On Hitler's Mountain offers a unique, gripping, and vitally important first-person perspective on a tumultuous era in modern history, as viewed through the eyes of a child -- a candid and fascinating document, free of rationalization and whitewash, that chronicles the devastating moral collapse of a civilized nation.

    Based upon his journal.

    Ken Saro-Wiwa, a renowned poet and environmentalist, was campaigning to protect his Ogoni people against the encroachments of Shell Oil and a brutal dictatorship. He was imprisoned, tortured, brought to trial on trumped-up charges, and executed. At the heart of the public campaign to save Ken Saro-Wiwa was another Ken Wiwa—the author's son—who travelled the world lobbying world leaders and mobilizing public opinion, so that his father was recognized as a hero and a symbol of the struggle for environmental justice. The Saro-Wiwa name became global currency for righteousness. Ken Wiwa has embarked on a book that tells the story—from a human, anecdotal perspective—of what it means to grow up as a child in the shadow of such extraordinary men and women. In the end, it's about Ken's attempts to make peace with himself and his father—following his journey as he reaches toward a final rendezvous with the father who was snatched by the hangman.

    Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortenson’s quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.

    From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops—including the man who was to become her husband—in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

    Imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, they miraculously survive the Nazis’ murderous brutality.Then Gustav learns he is being sent to Auschwitz—and certain death.For Fritz, letting his father go is unthinkable. Desperate to remain together, Fritz makes an incredible choice: he insists he must go too. To the Nazis, one death camp is the same as another, and so the boy is allowed to follow. Throughout the six years of horror they witness and immeasurable suffering they endure as victims of the camps, one constant keeps them alive: their love and hope for the future. Based on the secret diary that Gustav kept as well as meticulous archival research and interviews with members of the Kleinmann family, including Fritz’s younger brother Kurt, sent to the United States at age eleven to escape the war, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is Gustav and Fritz’s story—an extraordinary account of courage, loyalty, survival, and love that is unforgettable.

    The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.The Girl in the Green Sweater is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, The Girl in the Green Sweater is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.

    The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals and photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy.As a young boy, Shakespeare had always believed that his aunt was a member of the Resistance and had been tortured by the Germans. The truth turned out to be far more complicated.

    Alex Kerr brings to life the ritualized world of Kabuki, retraces his initiation into Tokyo's boardrooms during the heady Bubble Years, and tells the story of the hidden valley that became his home.But the book is not just a love letter. Haunted throughout by nostalgia for the Japan of old, Kerr's book is part paean to that great country and culture, part epitaph in the face of contemporary Japan's environmental and cultural destruction.Winner of Japan's 1994 Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize.Alex Kerr is an American writer, antiques collector and Japanologist. Lost Japan is his most famous work. He was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan.

    When the Greeks were then betrayed by their Persian employers, they were forced to march home through hundreds of miles of difficult terrain - adrift in a hostile country and under constant attack from the unforgiving Persians and warlike tribes. In this outstanding description of endurance and individual bravery, Xenophon, one of those chosen to lead the retreating army, provides a vivid narrative of the campaign and its aftermath, and his account remains one of the best pictures we have of Greeks confronting a 'barbarian' world.

    It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting was resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years inbetween, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. --David Vincent

    Over the next five years, as the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews gathered momentum, Eva’s parents were forced to send their children into hiding, but she and her sister Marta could not avoid capture.In this remarkable memoir, Eva recounts her experiences at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, she witnessed countless horrors and was herself subjected to torture, extreme deprivation, and medical experimentation at the hands of the notorious Dr Josef Mengele. When the Soviet army liberated the survivors of Auschwitz early in 1945, Eva and Marta faced a new challenge: crossing war-torn Europe to be reunited with their family.Narrated with the heartbreaking innocence of a young girl and the wisdom of a woman of eighty-three, Gazing at the Stars is a record of survival in the face of unimaginable evil. It is the culmination of Eva Slonim’s lifelong commitment to educating the world about the Holocaust, and to keeping alive the memory of the many who perished.‘Eva’s account of her experiences is remarkable in its detail, particularly when one considers her age. Through her 14-year-old eyes, the daily humiliations, deprivations and tortures of Auschwitz are thrown into sharp relief.’ - the Age‘An extraordinary memoir that is brimming with courage, hope and love in the face of evil. Slonim’s story . . . is a must read for everyone.’ - Books and Publishing OnlineEva Slonim (née Weiss) was born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1931. A survivor of the Holocaust, Eva relocated with her family to Melbourne in 1948. She married Ben Slonim in 1953, and together they had five children, and many grandchildren and great- grandchildren, fulfilling Eva’s wish to rebuild what was lost in Europe. A gifted storyteller, and deeply passionate about the importance of education and community, Eva has for many years given public talks on her experiences during the war.

     From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house. But who were these men and women that passed through the Bertram’s house? And what activities did they conduct whilst in France that meant that so many of them never returned? Edward Wake-Walker charts the experiences of numerous agents, such as Gilbert Renault, Christian Pineau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the networks of operatives that they created that provided top-secret intelligence on German defences and naval bases, U-boats, as well as Hitler’s devastating new weapons, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs. A House For Spies provides fascinating insight into the lives of SIS agents and their Lysander pilots who provided invaluable intelligence to Allied forces. This is a much-forgotten aspect of the Second World War that is only now being told by Edward Wake-Walker. “Utterly fascinating, very moving and funny. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.” — Hugh Grant “Edward Wake-Walker's meticulously researched chronicles of desperate resistance, audacity, duty, determination and daring are a valuable addition to the history of World War II” — Bel Mooney, Daily Mail “It kept me up at night as I wanted to know what happened to all the various characters [brought] so admirably back to life” — Russell England, Director of Bletchley Park: Codebreaking's Forgotten Genius and Operation Mincemeat

    Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine police, hostile islanders, and successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and that one day his fellow soldiers would return victorious. This account of those years is an epic tale of the will to survive that offers a rare glimpse of man's invincible spirit, resourcefulness, and ingenuity. A hero to his people, Onoda wrote down his experiences soon after his return to civilization. This book was translated into English the following year and has enjoyed an approving audience ever since.