Book picks similar to
Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities by Suzanne E. Evans
history
nonfiction
non-fiction
eugenics
If This Is a Man • The Truce
Primo Levi - 1987
He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in The Periodic Table and The Wrench, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known' - Philip Roth.
Maybe You Will Survive: A Holocaust Memoir
Aron Goldfarb - 1991
Maybe you will survive…”Aron Goldfarb was fifteen years old when he was ripped from his bed in Poland and forced to enter a Jewish work camp. Watching helplessly as Nazis murdered his friends and family, he and his brother, Abe, made their courageous escape after hearing rumours of fellow prisoners being executed in gas chambers.With astonishing bravery and an unshakeable will to survive, the brothers hid together in underground holes on an estate controlled by the Gestapo. In this moving testament to the strength of human endurance and the power of relationships, co-written with acclaimed author Graham Diamond, Goldfarb tells his unbelievable true tale at long last.Vivid, compelling and frequently harrowing, Maybe You Will Survive is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the human condition.Marking seventy-five years since the end of the Holocaust and Aron’s liberation, this edition includes a foreword his from sons, Morris & Ira.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Elaine Scarry - 1985
The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.
The Nazi Hunters
Andrew Nagorski - 2016
Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent. The Nazi Hunters focuses on the few who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten—& who were determined to track them down. The Nazi Hunters reveals the experiences of the young American prosecutors in the Nuremberg & Dachau trials, Benjamin Ferencz & Wm Denson; the Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn, who handled the case of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss; Germany’s judge & prosecutor Fritz Bauer, who repeatedly forced his countrymen to confront their country’s record of mass murder; the Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, in charge of the Israeli team that nabbed Eichmann; & Eli Rosenbaum, who rose to head the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations that belatedly sought to expel war criminals who were living in the USA. But some of the Nazi hunters’ most controversial actions involved ambiguous cases, such as former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s attempt to cover up his wartime history. Or the fate of concentration camp guards who have lived into their 90s, long past the time when reliable eyewitnesses could be found to pinpoint their exact roles. The story of the Nazi hunters is coming to an end. It was unprecedented in many ways, especially the degree to which the initial impulse of revenge was transformed into a struggle for justice. The Nazi hunters have transformed fundamental notions of right & wrong. Nagorski’s book is a richly reconstructed odyssey, a tale of gritty determination, at times reckless behavior & relentless pursuit.
Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation
Ari Folman - 2017
With stunning, expressive illustrations and ample direct quotation from the diary, this edition will expand the readership for this important and lasting work of history and literature.
In the Shadow of Majdanek. Hiding in Full Sight . : A Holocaust Survival Story
Irene R. Skolnick - 2017
This is what mother decided would be our best chance at survival. This was not an easy undertaking. To blend into the Polish community it was essential not to look Jewish; not to sound Jewish; to know a fair amount about Catholicism; and be able to think on your feet when unexpected events occurred. Above all one needed to be lucky. With counterfeit documents we changed our name and moved to Lublin, the site of Majdanek, the second largest concentration camp in Poland. At that time I was five years old and my brother was seven. We had to learn new names and to never reveal our past. No sooner we got settled that members of my father’s family descended on us seeking shelter. In a small, primitive house we hid up to eight members of my father’s family.
Auschwitz: A History
Sybille Steinbacher - 2004
Here the utopian twentieth-century dream of employing science and technology to improve and protect human life was inverted from the latter part of the 1930s through the end of the Second World War, as the same systems were manipulated in the cause of efficient mass slaughter. Historian Sybille Steinbacher's powerful and eminently important book details Auschwitz's birth, growth, and horrible mutation into a dreadful city. How it came to be and how what followed was allowed to occur is a story that everyone needs to understand and remember.
Hitler's Girls: Doves Amongst Eagles
Tim Heath - 2017
Concentrating purely on the role of German girls in Hitler's Third Reich, we learn of their home lives, schooling, exploitation and eventual militarization from firsthand accounts of women who were indoctrinated into the Jung Madel and Bund Deutscher Mädel as young girls. From the prosperous beginnings of 1933 to the cataclysmic defeat of 1945, this insightful book examines in detail their specific roles as defined by the Nazi state. Few historical literary works have gone as deep to find the truth, the conscience and the regret, and in this sense 'Hitler's Girls' is a unique work unlike any other yet published. Written in an attempt to provide a definitive voice for this unheard generation of German females, it will leave the reader to decide for themselves whether or not the girls were the obedient accessories to genocide, and it will lead many readers to question many aspects of what they have previously thought about the role of girls and young women in Hitler's Third Reich. This is their story.
In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
Irene Gut Opdyke - 1992
One's first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence."Through this intimate and compelling memoir, we are witness to the growth of a hero. Irene Gut was just a girl when the war began: seventeen, a Polish patriot, a student nurse, a good Catholic girl. As the war progressed, the soldiers of two countries stripped her of all she loved -- her family, her home, her innocence -- but the degradations only strengthened her will.She began to fight back. Irene was forced to work for the German Army, but her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her youth bought her the relatively safe job of waitress in an officers' dining room. She would use this Aryan mask as both a shield and a sword: She picked up snatches of conversation along with the Nazis' dirty dishes and passed the information to Jews in the ghetto. She raided the German Warenhaus for food and blankets. She smuggled people from the work camp into the forest. And, when she was made the housekeeper of a Nazi major, she successfully hid twelve Jews in the basement of his home until the Germans' defeat.This young woman was determined to deliver her friends from evil. It was as simple and as impossible as that.
Discovering the Rommel Murder
Charles F. Marshall - 1994
Contains previously unpublished letters and photographs from the Rommel family.
Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries
Laurel Holliday - 1995
As powerful as The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary, children's experiences are written with an unguarded eloquence that belies their years. Some of the diarists include: a Hungarian girl, selected by Mengele to be put in a line of prisoners who were tortured and murdered; a Danish Christian boy executed by the Nazis for his partisan work; and a twelve-year-old Dutch boy who lived through the Blitzkrieg in Rotterdam. And many others. These heartbreaking stories paint a harrowing picture of a genocide that will never be forgotten, and a war that shaped many generations to follow. All of their voices and visions ennoble us all.
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
Anna Bikont - 2004
The barn was then set on fire. Anyone attempting to escape, or found in hiding, was quickly killed.The story soon spread that the massacre was organised and executed by Nazi paramilitary forces. It seemed to fit. Similar atrocities had taken place in nearby villages – although none of this scale. But the truth was very different. Over the course of the twentieth century fragments of the real story began to surface. It emerged that the perpetrators of the act were in fact the Polish villagers, who, on one afternoon, turned on and killed their Jewish neighbours. But why?Part history, part memoir, part detective story, The Crime and the Silence is an award-winning journalist’s account of the events of July 1941: the true story of the massacre, a portrait of a town coming to terms with its dark past, and a vital contribution to Holocaust literature.
Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust
Alexandra Zapruder - 2002
The volume contains extensive excerpts from 15 diaries, ten of which have never before been translated and published in English. The diarists ranged in age from 12 to 22; some survived the Holocaust, but most perished. Taken together, their accounts of daily events and their often unexpected thoughts, ideas and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.
Mischling, Second Degree: My Childhood in Nazi Germany
Ilse Koehn - 1977
The memoirs of a German girl who became a leader among the Hitler Youth while her Social Democratic family kept from her the secret of her partial Jewish heritage.
Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America
Debbie Cenziper - 2019
Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two.In 1990, in a drafty basement archive in Prague, two American historians made a startling discovery: a Nazi roster from 1945 that no Western investigator had ever seen. The long-forgotten document, containing more than 700 names, helped unravel the details behind the most lethal killing operation in World War Two. In the tiny Polish village of Trawniki, the SS set up a school for mass murder and then recruited a roving army of foot soldiers, 5,000 men strong, to help annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Poland. After the war, some of these men vanished, making their way to the U.S. and blending into communities across America. Though they participated in some of the most unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, "Trawniki Men" spent years hiding in plain sight, their terrible secrets intact.In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from U.S. soil. Through insider accounts and research in four countries, this urgent and powerful narrative provides a front row seat to the dramatic turn of events that allowed a small group of American Nazi hunters to hold murderous men accountable for their crimes decades after the war's end.