Living a Life That Matters: from Nazi Nightmare to American Dream


Ben Lesser - 2011
    He also shows how this madness came to be–and the lessons that the world still needs to learn.In this true story, the reader will see how an ordinary human being–an innocent child–not only survived the Nazi Nightmare, but achieved the American Dream–and how you can achieve it too.

QB VII


Leon Uris - 1970
    In his book The Holocaust—born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration Camp was the site of his family’s extermination—Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga’s most sadistic inmate/doctors. Kelno has denied this and brought furious charges. Now unfolds Leon Uris’s riveting courtroom drama—one of the great fictional trials of the century.

The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe


William I. Hitchcock - 2008
    For many years, we have celebrated the courage of Allied soldiers, sailors, and aircrews who defeated Hitler's regime and restored freedom to the continent. But in recounting the heroism of the "greatest generation," Americans often overlook the wartime experiences of European people themselves -- the very people for whom the war was fought. In this brilliant new book, historian William I. Hitchcock surveys the European continent from D-Day to the final battles of the war and the first few months of the peace. Based on exhaustive research in five nations and dozens of archives, Hitchcock's groundbreaking account shows that the liberation of Europe was both a military triumph and a human tragedy of epic proportions.Hitchcock gives voice to those who were on the receiving end of liberation, moving them from the edge of the story to the center. From France to Poland to Germany, from concentration-camp internees to refugees, farmers to shopkeepers, husbands and wives to children, the experience of liberation was often difficult and dangerous. Their gratitude was mixed with guilt or resentment. Their lives were difficult to reassemble.This strikingly original, multinational history of liberation brings to light the interactions of soldiers and civilians, the experiences of noncombatants, and the trauma of displacement and loss amid unprecedented destruction. This book recounts a surprising story, often jarring and uncomfortable, and one that has never been told with such richness and depth.Ranging from the ferocious battle for Normandy (where as many French civilians died on D-Day as U.S. servicemen) to the plains of Poland, from the icy ravines of the Ardennes to the shattered cities and refugee camps of occupied Germany, "The Bitter Road to Freedom" depicts in searing detail the shocking price that Europeans paid for their freedom.Today, with American soldiers once again waging wars of liberation in faraway lands, this book serves as a timely and sharp reminder of the terrible human toll exacted by even the most righteous of wars.

The Lost Childhood: A World War II Memoir


Yehuda Nir - 1992
    Yehuda, along with his mother and teenage sister, escaped with the aid of false documents. It was 1941--the Holocaust was gaining a grim momentum. The family plunged into what would be four long, harrowing years disguised as Catholics. Never knowing if each day of hiding in the open would be his last, Yehuda was often forced to separate from his mother and sister, live on dogs and mice, hide in sewers, and live in utter chaos.

Nazi Women: The Attraction of Evil


Paul Roland - 2014
    Goering told women, “Take a pot, a dustpan and a broom, and marry a man,” but many became active Nazis, helping to spread wide the net of evil. By 1944, 40 percent of the Gestapo was staffed by women, concentration camps employed legions of Aufseherinnen (female guards), and callous nurses ran the euthanasia program. Prominent female Nazis included First Lady of the Third Reichb Magda Goebbels,Eva Braun, Lina Heydrich, Carin Goering and Unity Mitford. A cult of adoration developed round the unmarried Hitler. Love is meat for husbands, but my love for Hitler is stronger. I would give my life for it, said Magda Goebbels.

Nine Suitcases: A Memoir


Béla Zsolt - 1946
    Originally published in Hungary in weekly installments starting in 1946, it tells the harrowing story of Béla Zsolt’s experiences in the ghetto and as a forced laborer in the Ukraine. It gives not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but also a shocking exposure to the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings—the victims no less than the perpetrators—are capable in extreme circumstances.Apart from being one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust, Zsolt is also one of the most powerful. He bears comparison with Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, or Imre Kertész. Both an accomplished novelist and a highly skilled journalist, he was reporting and analyzing these appalling events soon after they occurred with exceptional clarity and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment.Zsolt was spared Auschwitz, but he witnessed and suffered some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust elsewhere; his nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller and larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying. The rediscovery and publication of Nine Suitcases is an event of great historical importance.

I Survived Auschwitz


Krystyna Zywulska - 2004
    Zywulska born in 1914 as Sonia Landau. During the German occupation of Poland, she was displaced with her Jewish family to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. She escaped from the Ghetto and became active in the Polish resistance movement. Under her new name, Zywulska, she was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. There is always the danger that we will forget things that are best not forgotten. Certainly, some things should be permanently recorded so that posterity will remember what we would prefer to erase from our memories. This is the story of a woman who was imprisoned for a number of years in Auschwitz, the notorious death camp. What she saw there makes medieval genocides look like child’s play. This is her memoir, and she shows not only her own courage but also her fellow prisoners’ fierce will to live. Half-starved, suffering from lice, scabies and dysentery and mowed down by typhus and pneumonia, they worked in fields of icy slush and mud and registered new arrivals—hundreds of thousands of women from Holland, Greece, Italy and Hungary, who did not know where they were or why they had been seized. That she survived and finally managed to escape to tell the tale is one of many reasons why this book should be published and widely read. Most of her companions were murdered so that they could not bear witness. Written just after the author’s escape and published in 1946, I Survived Auschwitz was the first ever book to emerge about the camp and therefore occupies an important place in Holocaust literature. In certain parts of this book you will notice changes made by Poland’s communist censors after 1945. Due to these interventions, the book has become an unintentional double witness to the 20th century’s two most dreadful totalitarian regimes. I Survived Auschwitz was published in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. With additional footnotes, 26 percent increase in text, and 45 photos taken during war, the new edition is greatly expanded compared to the original 1946 English version. The book was translated from the Polish, Przeżyłam Oświęcim, by Lech Czerski and Sheila Callahan based on an initial translation by Krystyna Cenkalska.

Beyond the Last Path: A Buchenwald Survivor's Story


Eugene Weinstock - 1947
    22483, who had been shipped from Belgium to Buchenwald. It records what he saw and felt during his calvary from Antwerp to the Malin distribution camp in France and from there to the extermination camp of Buchenwald. He was one of the few people who both entered a Nazi concentration camp and left again. This is his remarkable personal story that records his experiences of one of the most harrowing events in human history. Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the first and largest camps to be built on German soil and during the years that Weinstock spent there he kept company with other Jews, Poles, Slavs, political prisoners and many other men and women that the Nazi’s deemed subhuman. “A mere number, he had the strength to remain a man, an artist of the word, observing his captors, his fellow-prisoners, life in the shadow of death. … . Throughout, the writing is poignant, vibrant with humanity, a cry “de profundis” and a vow that it must never happen again. This book should be long remembered.” — Emil Lengyel Eugene Weinstock was a Hungarian Jew who was living in Belgium at the beginning of the Second World War. Beyond the Last Path records his life during those terrible years up to the point when American troops released the remaining prisoners in Buchenwald. By this time Weinstock weighed a mere eighty pounds and had seen many of his good friends die. His work was first published in the United States in 1947 where he had gone to. He passed away in 1984.

Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy


Larry Loftis - 2019
    Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill.As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues.In Code Name: Lise, Larry Loftis paints a portrait of true courage, patriotism, and love—of two incredibly heroic people who endured unimaginable horrors and degradations. He seamlessly weaves together the touching romance between Odette and Peter and the thrilling cat and mouse game between them and Sergeant Bleicher.

Edith's Story


Edith Velmans - 1998
    She also happened to be Jewish. In the same month that Anne Frank's family went into hiding, Edith was sent to live with a courageous Protestant family, took a new name, and survived by posing as a gentile. Ultimately one-third of the hidden Dutch Jews were discovered and murdered; most of Edith's family perished. Velmans's memoir is based on her teenage diaries, wartime letters, and reflections as an adult survivor. In recounting wartime events and the details of her feelings as the war runs its course, Edith's Story ultimately affirms life, love, and extraordinary courage. "The most vivid evocation of the experience of Nazi Occupation that I have ever read." - The Independent (London)

Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka


Richard Glazar - 1994
    In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.

Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps


Andrea Warren - 2001
    In this Robert F. Silbert Honor Book, narrated in the voice of Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum, readers will glimpse the dark reality of life during the Holocaust, and how one boy made it out alive.When twelve-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is separated from his family and shipped off to the Blechhammer concentration camp, his life becomes a never-ending nightmare. With minimal food to eat and harsh living conditions threatening his health, Jack manages to survive by thinking of his family.Supports the Common Core State Standards

The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found


Bart van Es - 2018
    It was a mystery of sorts: a young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents, who understood the danger they were in all too well. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, there was a falling out, and they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war, and after?So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life, and change it. After some sleuthing, he learned that Lientje was now in her 80s and living in Amsterdam. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to meet him, and eventually they struck up a remarkable friendship, even a partnership. The Cut Out Girl braids together a powerful recreation of that intensely harrowing childhood story of Lientje's with the present-day account of Bart's efforts to piece that story together, including bringing some old ghosts back into the light.It is a story rich with contradictions. There is great bravery and generosity--first Lientje's parents, giving up their beloved daughter, and then the Dutch families who face great danger from the Nazi occupation for taking Lientje and other Jewish children in. And there are more mundane sacrifices a family under brutal occupation must make to provide for even the family they already have. But tidy Holland also must face a darker truth, namely that it was more cooperative in rounding up its Jews for the Nazis than any other Western European country; that is part of Lientje's story too. Her time in hiding was made much more terrifying by the energetic efforts of the local Dutch authorities, zealous accomplices in the mission of sending every Jew, man, woman and child, East to their extermination. And Lientje was not always particularly well treated, and sometimes, Bart learned, she was very badly treated indeed.The Cut Out Girl is an astonishment, a deeply moving reckoning with a young girl's struggle for survival during war, a story about the powerful love of foster families but also the powerful challenges, and about the ways our most painful experiences define us but also can be redefined, on a more honest level, even many years after the fact. A triumph of subtlety, decency and unflinching observation, The Cut Out Girl is a triumphant marriage of many keys of writing, ultimately blending them into an extraordinary new harmony, and a deeper truth.

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America


Steven J. Ross - 2017
    The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: plans existed for hanging twenty prominent Hollywood figures such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Goldwyn; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast.U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, attorney Leon Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call "the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles," ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, this daring ring of spies uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction.Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Remember Your Name


Erik G. LeMoullec - 2014
    Medallion. While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood. From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Gorlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Liberated at sixteen, he took on smuggling as a means to survive. It was not until the Bricha approached him and he became a lead operative - smuggling thousands of refugees across country borders - that he was finally able to begin his life again. Teddy's story is one of survival amidst horrific circumstances. The author does not sensationalize the suffering his grandfather and his family endured, but in this work of narrative nonfiction simply recreates this remarkable man's early life during one of the darkest moments of human history.