At the time of his incarceration, Kitchin, a Finnish citizen, was working in Russia as a representative for an American firm. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police (known as the OGPU at the time), charged with violating an obscure regulation, held in prison, and then sent to a labor camp located in northern Russia where he describes the brutalities he endured and witnessed. He had the good fortune after a time to be assigned clerical work in the office of the penal camp administration. This undoubtedly saved his life and it also gave him a unique opportunity to observe the inner workings of the OGPU organization. As a citizen of Finland, his case was a matter of concern to the Finnish government, whose efforts finally obtained for him permission to leave Soviet Russia. His physical condition after four horrible years was dire. A year and a half were spent in convalescing, and another year in preparing his notes and writing this memoir of his experiences. Prisoner of the OGBU is one of the only first-hand authentic accounts of the penal camps of the Far North, and it is still relevant today in understanding and studying that brutal period of history. ‘This for the market of Escape from the Soviets, and others of the sort, an account of the piled-up horrors of a prison camp of the Soviet Secret Police. Kitchin was a representative of Finnish interests, and got caught on a technicality and sent for four horrible years to the far north. First hand data of Soviet methods and inefficiencies, of the regime and a revealing picture of behind the scenes, of incredible brutalities. Well done and thrillingly absorbing reading.’ – Kirkus Reviews

    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.

    Jewish historical fiction

    But in the autumn of 1939, decades of anti-Semitic propaganda turned into full-fledged violence. Bornstein’s family was subsequently sent to Auschwitz where his parents and siblings were gassed to death.The Long Night is Bornstein’s firsthand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others. The narrative is simple, yet profound; unbridled, honest, and dignified.The Long Night was written shortly after the war when the author’s memories were fresh and emotions ran strong. Originally published in German in 1967 as Die Lange Nacht, this is the first English translation of this work.

    She has survived British and American bombs and witnessed the destruction of Aachen, her ancient and beautiful city. How will a German woman cope in austere post-war Britain, where she is still regarded as the enemy?Illustrated with almost 100 images and original documents, The Bride’s Trunk describes the adventures of an unremarkable piece of luggage and three generations of its owners, whose journeys across Europe are determined by the turbulent events of twentieth century history.

    When the persecution of Jews begins, both are plucked from their reality and thrust into concentration camps. They are stripped of everything they know and forced to navigate a truly incomprehensible, volatile, dangerous and unpredictable world. Even when separated from support systems and family members, their drive to survive helps them cope. Despite their exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust, they endure and carry on with a determination that shapes their character forever. Follow the lives of Rose and Max as they learn to adapt to a reality beyond belief and emerge stronger than ever. When they are finally liberated from their concentration camps, they navigate a new world individually before eventually coming together to form what each so tragically lost: A FAMILY

    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.

    She longed to have relatives and knew precious little about her Czech father's childhood as a refugee.On the night before Juliet's father died, in 2006, Juliet's father suddenly looked up and said: 'The plane is in the hangar.' In the years after his death, Juliet comes to truly understand the significance of these words.On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions.Juliet traces the grim fate of her father's cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness.Then in a locked box in Britain's National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle.Meticulously researched and beautifully told, this is the moving story of a woman's quest to piece together the hidden parts of her father's life and the unimaginable losses he was determined to protect his children from.PRAISE FOR THE WRITING ON THE WALL'Rieden sets out to chart her story with a journalist's rigour: facts, timelines, archival material. She does it brilliantly. But it is the small, powerful resonant moments within a harrowing arc that bring her story alive.' The Australian

    Paula, a polyglot architect, and Meir, a textile industrialist, fled with their only child, Israel, to Vilnius, Lithuania, and later to Bialystok, attempting to save themselves from certain death in the extermination camps. In the midst of terror, there they found grace In August 1943, the Bialystok Ghetto was emptied by the Nazis and all its occupants were sent to extermination. The Steins had managed to remain hidden in the Ghetto for five more weeks, before escaping to their new hideout—the home of a Polish family, backed by a German official, that gave them refuge. They remained hidden there for nearly a year, until the war ended, with the daily danger of being discovered and sent to death. They lived to see Bialystok liberated by the Russian Red Army, and eventually settled in the new state of Israel. The events of the Holocaust as they were seen through the eyes of a real middle-class Polish Jewish family Architecture of Survival brings forward the diaries Paula and Meir Stein wrote while in hideout during the Second World War, accompanied by the vivid visual memories of their son, Israel Stein, who witnessed the horrors as a child. It is a rare historical documentation, read in bated breath. Get your copy of Architecture of Survival now!

    The epic history is narrowed down to the struggle of a single boy nicknamed Leosz to survive the war. From age 7 to age 13, he endures all the horrors that the Holocaust brings upon the Jewish people. Life hangs on split-second timing, decision-making in impossibly cruel circumstances, incredible resourcefulness, luck and the help of others, even Germans.In the Krakow Ghetto, Leosz is saved from three mass deportations to the death camps. He escapes the ghetto, survives for several weeks pretending to be a Polish street child, and then goes into hiding. Although sentenced to die after being caught, he is instead miraculously reunited with his family in the Plaszow labor camp. A year later, father and son become slave laborers in the Gozen 2 camp in Austria, where his father perishes. Close to death himself, Leosz is finally liberated by the American army on May 5th, 1945. Scroll up and grab a copy today.

    In The Mousetrap -- winner of the 2003 San Diego Book Award for an Unpublished Memoir -- she tells the harrowing true story of her experiences as a young Bohemian woman in the years after the Second World War ended. She tells of the understandable brutality with which she and her family and friends were treated after the Germans lost the war. She also tells the story of a mother-daughter relationship that, because of the terrible times in which they lived, threatened to kill them both.At the time of her death, Ruth had nearly completed the next portion of her autobiography, which is currently being prepared for publication.Learn more about Ruth Eigner at TheMousetrapBook.com or find her on page on Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/TheMousetrap...From the Introduction to The Mousetrap --Now that I have finally brought myself to write of these events, which took place nearly sixty-five years ago in a middle European land which no longer exists, I am faced with the fact that Americans now coming of age, like my own grandchildren, will need some historical background. The country was Czechoslovakia, created in 1918, made up of a hodge-podge of nationalities – Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarian, Poles and others -- previously ruled by the Austrians, losers of the First World War. My own people, ethnic Germans, had lived in this same territory for almost a thousand years, and since we spoke the same language as the Austrian rulers, I suppose we thought of ourselves as better than our neighbors. Many of us were also excessively proud of our German culture, believing that it was superior to that of the Slavic people who now vastly outnumbered us in the new country. There was great fear among chauvinists and prejudiced Germans that we might lose our national identity and be forced even to give up our language. These people argued and sometimes demonstrated violently for the creation of a new German country. And the uprisings they fomented were sometimes put down with corresponding violence. It was easy, therefore for Adolf Hitler to argue in 1938 that the German citizens of Czechoslovakia needed his protection. To “save” us, as he said, from the persecution of the Czechs, he annexed the part of the country in which we lived. I was only twelve when this happened, but I was old enough to remember that there was much cheering in the streets when the German troops marched in. I remember also that during the next seven years which passed before the defeat of the Nazis, Germans of my group, even boys I grew up with, enlisted or were drafted to fight in Hitler’s army. No doubt many of them joined in the persecution of those who had been our fellow Czechoslovakians for the past twenty years, the descendants of people who had been our neighbors for centuries. Who could blame the Czechs for wanting to get revenge once Hitler was gone, and they were back in power? They felt, that unless we were driven from the country, we would betray them again at the first opportunity. All this was understandable, but it did not lessen the fear of the German Czechoslovakians, both the innocent and the guilty among us, who faced this reciprocal terror. -- Ruth Hanka Eigner

    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......"

    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.

     But what did the German people think of the war? And what had they actually thought about the rise of the Nazi party? William Russell, a young US diplomat who worked in the American Embassy in Berlin, explains in detail his experiences of Germany in the early phases of the war from August 1939 through to April 1940. By asking questions to his friends, colleagues and people who he passed on the streets, Russell uncovered the state of minds of normal Germans, what they were thinking, doing and saying through the course of 1939 and 1940. Drawing evidence from a variety of sources, including newspapers, the radio, recently published books, as well as the jokes and gossip that circulated on the streets of the German capital, Russell is able to demonstrate how not all Germans were card-waving Nazis, but how the vast majority were politically apathetic, nervous of the future and often outwardly critical of the Nazi regime. Russell explains how many Germans laughed at figures such as Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering when they were in privacy of their own houses. Although written in only second year of the war it is clear that Russell and many of his friends are aware of the impending horrors that the war will cause and he tries desperately throughout the book to do his best for those who would suffer the most at the hands of the Nazi regime. Berlin Embassy is the classic account of Germany and its people in the first year of the Second World War. “The small things that happen to the small people- as reported by a man in a small job in the American embassy in Berlin, who managed to get the man in the street to talk frankly.” Kirkus Reviews “Exciting reading … A very fine book.” William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany William Russell was an author and journalist who after completing his education had worked in the Berlin Embassy during 1939 and 1940. After he left Germany he joined the U.S. Army and served two years as an Order of Battle Specialist in the Intelligence Branch in England. He passed away in 2000. His book Berlin Embassy was first published in 1941.

    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.