Sixty years after her death, when Götz Aly received the award, he was moved to find out whatever he could about Marion's short life and restore this child to history. In what is as much a detective story as a historical reconstruction, Aly, praised for his "formidable research skills" (Christopher Browning), traces the Samuel family's agonizing decline from shop owners to forced laborers to deportees. Against all odds, Aly manages to recover expropriation records, family photographs, and even a trace of Marion's voice in the premonition she confided to a school friend: "People disappear," she said, "into the tunnel." A gripping account of a family caught in the tightening grip of persecution, Into the Tunnel is a powerful reminder that the millions of Nazi victims were also, each one, an individual life.

    While there, she was caught by the Security Police, imprisoned and tortured.

    A Holocaust survivor chronicles the chain of events that kept him alive, providing first-hand accounts of Hitler's rise to power, Kristallnacht, and confinement in various concentration camps.

    She found:Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America;Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal;Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion.Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

    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.

    It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labor camps in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. After liberation by the British in April 1945, she finally returned to Prague.Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele at an Auschwitz selection, saying she was an electrician, an occupation that both endangered and saved her life. In this memoir, she offers her intense, candid, and sometimes funny account of those dark years, with the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends.Franci's War is the powerful testimony of one incredibly strong young woman who endured the horrors of the Holocaust and survived.

    Joseph Mengele’s answer to Roma, the author, and to millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Written to fulfill a promise made in the darkest moment of human history, this simple and eloquent story is unique in that it spans the geography of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Rachel (Roma in Polish), the teenage daughter of a journalist, relays to us the experiences of a schoolgirl and her classmates under the German occupied Warsaw Ghetto. She is a witness and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the Nazis smoke her out of hiding, she bravely faces the reality of the gas chambers and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Originally written in Polish, this is an eloquent and unforgettable account of survival.

    Even average Israelis are wondering if they wouldn't be better off somewhere else and whether they ought to persevere. Daniel Gordis is confident his fellow Jews can renew their faith in the cause, and in Saving Israel, he outlines how.2009 National Jewish Book Award winnerAddresses the most pressing issues faced by Israel-and American Jews-today, without recycling the same old argumentsLays to rest some of the most pernicious myths about Israel, including: Jews could thrive without Israel; Israeli Arabs just want equality, and Palestinians just want their own state; peace will come, if Israel will just do the right things""Morally powerful . . . from a writer whose reflections are consistently as intellectually impressive as they are moving. . . . Gordis addresses the exigencies of our time with the urgency they overridingly demand, and with the depth of feeling they inspire.""-Cynthia OzickGordis has written many popular personal essays and memoirs in the past, but Saving Israel is a full-throated call to arms. Never has the case for defending-no, celebrating-the existence of Israel been so clear, so passionate, or so worthy of wholehearted support.

    He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. When Time Stopped is a detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.

    Someone was trying to kill her, "to put a bullet in my head," Sonia told anyone who would listen. Polish and Jewish, Sonia Reich had survived the Holocaust by staying always on the run. She and Howard's father, Robert, also a Holocaust survivor, had fled to America, moved to Chicago, and raised their young son to tell no one that they were Jewish. It was only after moving to Skokie, a town filled with Holocaust survivors, that his family would live as Jews. Still, his parents told Howard almost nothing about their past. The First and Final Nightmare… is Reich's moving and bittersweet memoir of growing up in Skokie, discovering an odd and personal American freedom in jazz, and his riveting, revealing investigation into his family's past and the nature of his mother's illness, called late-onset Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a poignant story of a mother and a son, a haunted past, and the irony of what may happen when that often repeated admonition to "never forget" becomes a curse.

    These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured. The recollections are from the start of the war—the home invasions, the Gestapo busts, and the ghettos—as well as the daily hell of the concentration camps and what actually happened inside.Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and this hefty collection of stories told by its survivors is one of the most important books of our time. It was compiled by award-winning author Anthony S. Pitch, who worked with sources such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to get survivors’ stories compiled together and to supplement them with images from the war. These memories must be told and held onto so what happened is documented; so the lives of those who perished are not forgotten—so history does not repeat itself.

    Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, 50 years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation, discovered in his briefcase after his suicide, and reproduced here for the first time. Including previously unpublished photographs, this book traces the life of a man who survived five concentration camps, and details what he had to do to achieve this. Hershl's story, from his childhood in a small Polish town to the bridge in faraway Scotland, is testament to the lasting torment of those very few who survived the Nazis' most efficient and gruesome death factory. The author personally follows in his subject's footsteps from Klobuck, to Treblinka, to Glasgow.

    The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before. Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced. As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency.NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST (2012) Part of the Jewish Encounter series

    In eloquent prose, Pogany portrays how the Holocaust destroyed the brothers' close childhood bond: his father, a survivor of a Nazi internment camp, denounced Christianity and returned to the Judaism of his birth, while his uncle, who found shelter in an Italian monastic community during the war, became a Catholic priest. Even after emigrating to America the brothers remained estranged, each believing the other a traitor to their family's faith. This tragic memoir is a rich, moving family portrait as well as an objective historical account of the rupture between Jews and Catholics.

    With cinematic power and beauty, bestselling author David Laskin limns his own genealogy to tell the spellbinding tale of the three drastically different paths that his family members took across the span of 150 years. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Laskin’s great-great-grandfather, a Torah scribe named Shimon Dov HaKohen, raised six children with his wife, Beyle, in a yeshiva town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. The pious couple expected their sons and daughters to carry the family tradition into future generations. But the social and political upheavals of the twentieth century decreed otherwise. The HaKohen family split off into three branches. One branch emigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; one branch went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; and the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the Holocaust. In tracing the roots of his own family, Laskin captures the epic sweep of twentieth-century history. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is an eloquent masterwork of true grandeur—a deeply personal, dramatic, and universal account of a people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.