But the times Anne lived in and wrote of in her diary made her simple life extraordinary. In over one hundred photographs, many which have never been published, this poignant memoir brings to life the harrowing story of one young Jewish woman's struggle to survive during a period of history which must never be forgotten.

    What Papa Told Me is the story of Murray, a young Jewish boy from Poland whose courage and sheer will to live helped him survive eight different labor and concentration camps in the Holocaust, start a new life in America, and keep a family intact in the aftermath of his wife's suicide - one of the Nazis' last victims.

    Nonna's writings tell the remarkable tale of how a Russian girl, born into a family that had known wealth and privileges, was exposed to the concentration camps and learned the value of human life and the importance of forgiveness.

    Overwhelmed by the horror of his discoveries as they become entangled with his own feverish imaginings, he organizes a class trip. The school bus becomes Götz and Meyer’s truck, and the teacher and his students merge with Belgrade’s lost souls in a sacred act of remembering.

    With the clouds gathering, they realized they had no means to leave and therefore must ride out the storm. Their hopes faded as stricter restrictions were placed on them and the bullying and hatred of Jews intensified. Suddenly, Kristallnacht erupted and the numbers of killings and deportations surged. The family was repeatedly pushed deeper into the neglected ghettos, and the father was forced into slave labor. The Nazi SS was assigned the task of making Berlin the center of Hitler s growing evil empire Judenfrei (Jewish free). The mother and children had no choice but to flee the terror when it finally arrived at their door; it was already too late for the father. Running into the night, with no other options, the mother made a phone call to a woman who might be either a friend or an enemy. A plan was quickly hatched. "There is no good place to hide; you can only hide amongst your enemy and pray that your secret is not discovered." And what a train ride it was....

    With more than 200 illustrations by the author.

    Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization? In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanation and comprehensive analysis of the genocide's many causes, revealing how a once-progressive society like Germany could have carried out this crime. The Holocaust, he explains, was caused not by one but by a combination of factors -- from Germany's failure to become a democracy until 1918, to the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and scientific racism, to the effects of World War I, which intensified political divisions within the country and drastically lowered the value of human life in the minds of an entire generation. Masterfully synthesizing the myriad causes that led Germany to disaster, McMillan shows why thousands of Germans carried out the genocide while millions watched, with cold indifference, as it enveloped their homeland. Persuasive and compelling, How Could This Happen explains how a perfect storm of bleak circumstances, malevolent ideas, and damaged personalities unleashed history's most terrifying atrocity.

    In this touching memoir, as told to Alison Leslie Gold, Hannah recalls the funny, bright girl who suddenly disappeared from her life -- until they met again at a concentration camp.

    Rich with powerful never-before-published details from the author’s interviews with more than 150 U.S. soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps, The Liberators is an essential addition to the literature of World War II—and a stirring testament to Allied courage in the face of inconceivable atrocities.Taking us from the beginnings of the liberators’ final march across Germany to V-E Day and beyond, Michael Hirsh allows us to walk in their footsteps, experiencing the journey as they themselves experienced it. But this book is more than just an in-depth account of the liberation. It reveals how profoundly these young men were affected by what they saw—the unbelievable horror and pathos they felt upon seeing “stacks of bodies like cordwood” and “skeletonlike survivors” in camp after camp. That life-altering experience has stayed with them to this very day. It’s been well over half a century since the end of World War II, and they still haven’t forgotten what the camps looked like, how they smelled, what the inmates looked like, and how it made them feel. Many of the liberators suffer from what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder and still experience Holocaust-related nightmares.  Here we meet the brave souls who—now in their eighties and nineties—have chosen at last to share their stories. Corporal Forrest Robinson saw masses of dead bodies at Nordhausen and was so horrified that he lost his memory for the next two weeks. Melvin Waters, a 4-F volunteer civilian ambulance driver, recalls that a woman at Bergen-Belsen “fought us like a cat because she thought we were taking her to the crematory.” Private Don Timmer used his high school German to interpret for General Dwight Eisenhower during the supreme Allied commander’s visit to Ohrdruf, the first camp liberated by the Americans. And Phyllis Lamont Law, an army nurse at Mauthausen-Gusen, recalls the shock and, ultimately, “the hope” that “you can save a few.” From Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany to Mauthausen in Austria, The Liberators offers readers an intense and unforgettable look at the Nazi death machine through the eyes of the men and women who were our country’s witnesses to the Holocaust. The liberators’ recollections are historically important, vivid, riveting, heartbreaking, and, on rare occasions, joyous and uplifting. This book is their opportunity, perhaps for the last time, to tell the world.

    She paid no heed to the stories about a man named Adolf Hitler, his Nazi Party, and their plan for a world that did not include Jews. But almost overnight her ordinary life was gone, replaced by a nightmare world of terror and death. Millions of people disappeared into the horror of the Holocaust. But Blima's story survives. It is told here by her daughter, Shirley Russak Wachtel.

    This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century that remains hotly debated to this day.

    During World War II, six million Jews—as well as other targeted groups including Poles, the handicapped, and homosexuals—were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Although the weight and heft of The Holocaust Chronicle cannot capture the immensity of its subject, the book’s 768 pages suggest that the Holocaust is a topic that must be openly confronted. Written and fact-checked by top scholars, the chronicle offers:A 3,000-item timeline pinpointing specific events that contributed to the Holocaust, such as Nazi Germany occupation during World War II, the sealing of urban ghettos in Europe, and the deportation of millions of Jews to death camps.Nearly 2,000 photographs chronicling the Holocaust in starkly visual terms, including images of the massacre of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar and pictures from the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.Fourteen chapter-opening essays that put the most important years of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath into perspective, beginning with Hitler’s rise to power and ending with the convictions of such Nazi officials as Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trial.More than 250 sidebars detailing the significant places, issues, events, and people of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank and Heinrich Himmler.An extensive prologue and epilogue that discuss the buildup to and aftermath of the Holocaust.* This is an alternate cover of Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures (ISBN-13: 9781680228328), content is the same. *

    Survival in Auschwitz is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.

    Enduring hunger, rats, thirst, dysentery, and incredible psychological pressure, they hid for nearly two years in the sewer system beneath the city of Lvov. Their courage, as detailed in this inspiring book, is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.

    With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family.The black family's story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people—the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves—who took their rightful place in mainstream America.In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family—once one of the wealthiest in America—to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family's fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history—the history of slavery's curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching.Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation's attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.