Through dogged research and interviews with Perla, the youngest Ovitz daughter and last surviving sibling, and other relatives, authors Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were popular entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944. Descending from the transport train into the hell of the concentration camp, the Ovitz family—known widely as the Lilliput Troupe—was separated from other Jewish victims. When Dr. Josef Mengele was then notified of their arrival, he assigned them to sequestered quarters. His horrific "research" on twins and other genetically unique individuals already under way, Mengele had special plans for the Ovitzes. The authors chronicle Mengele's loathsome experiments upon the family members, the disturbing fondness he developed for these small people, and their interminable will to make it out alive. Dozens of telling photographs are included in this horrifying yet remarkable tale of survival.

    In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city.In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it. Always on the run, never certain whom she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safe-houses, living with foreign workers, staunch communists, and even committed Nazis. Only her quick-witted determination and the most hair-raising strokes of luck allowed her to survive.

    It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author’s father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz—“the place,” writes Kofman, “where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.” It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne. The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father’s disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Mémé, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman’s close attachment to Mémé also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed.This slender volume is distinguished by the author’s clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

    History professor Erik Mueller is a model citizen and a family man. He’s also a decorated sergeant in the Gestapo. Proving his courage on the battlefields of Poland and the Soviet Union, and proud of the German army’s victories across Europe, he embraces what he thinks is the righteousness of the Third Reich’s cause.But his loyalties are soon tested when he crosses paths with his old university friend Trude Bensheim. Forced into unemployment for being Jewish, Trude and her husband start a secret organization to help Jews escape Germany. But when they are betrayed by someone they thought they could trust, their lives hang in the balance.Erik feels responsible for Trude’s capture, and he knows he’s in a position to help them. But when everything he holds dear is at stake, will he save his friends…or himself?

    How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories?" As Eva Hoffman ponders the ambiguous consequences of the cultural preoccupation with the Holocaust and guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the present, and urges us to transform potent family narratives into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history.

    Its mission was to launch Operation Torch, the first massive Allied offensive operation of World War Two. This is the story of the most crucial campaigns of World War Two. It is an account of Operation Torch and of the start of the process that led to the destruction of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Torch — the Allied invasion and conquest of North Africa — was an intricate enterprise. More than five hundred American and British warships, supply vessels, and troop transports were taking part. It involved political intrigue, espionage, conspiracy, a massive disinformation campaign, a muddled coup d’état, the most momentous amphibious assault ever undertaken until then, and the transformation of half-trained, pummelled troops into victorious warriors. Norman Gelb masterfully weaves these various elements into an absorbing account of an historic moment. He describes how the Allies, their military prospects grim early in the war, agonised on how and where to expend their still slender resources on their first major offensive operation; how Winston Churchill 'hijacked’ the direction of Allied strategy from America’s generals who wanted to fight the war a different way; how Eisenhower, the Torch supreme commander, was often out of his depth but nevertheless forged an effective, harmonious Anglo-American military alliance; how the attitudes of Vichy France and Franco’s Spain distorted invasion calculations; how arch rivals Montgomery and Rommel influenced the course of events; and how, finally, for better or worse, Operation Torch determined the Allied strategy for most of the rest of the war. A senior American diplomat has called Operation Torch the most important decision made in the struggle against Hitler. Desperate Venture shows how and why in a meticulously researched and highly detailed narrative account of one of the most crucial operations in World War Two.  NORMAN GELB was born in New York and is the author of seven highly acclaimed books, including The Berlin Wall, Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain, and Less Than Glory. He was, for many years, correspondent for the Mutual Broadcasting System, first in Berlin and then in London. He is currently the London correspondent for New Leader magazine. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    On scraps of paper hidden by friends and strangers until their dying moments, young Ana Novac kept a diary in Auschwitz, a testimony that deserves to become one of the most treasured books of our time.

    Ruth Elias, a young Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia, survived three years in the Nazi camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. In this haunting testimony, she relives the day-to-day conditions and horrific inhumane treatment of those years. She describes in painful detail how, having given birth in Auschwitz, she and her baby became part of a sadistic experiment personally conducted by the infamous SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele. Triumph of Hope also vividly recounts the aftermath of imprisonment, the difficult adjustment to normal life after the war. Ruth Elias's story is a portrayal of the emotional and psychological state of life in chaotic postwar Europe: from the desperate, futile attempts to track down family and friends; to the unabated hostility of former neighbors; to the chilling indifference of those who knew nothing of the experience of the camps. For Ruth, hope would have to take the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited.

    This is without a doubt one of the most fascinating testimonies of that dark period, thanks to the author's ability not only to recount what he endured, but also to reflect on his feelings back then, in the camps. Existential difficulties preceded the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, yet nothing could have been worse than the extermination camps.Moshe was 15 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, yet he passed the selection and survived. The Nazis sent the occupants of his barrack to their death, while he managed to slip out of their hands, and survived. He was sent to Buchenwald, worked in hard labor in the quarry, and survived. By joining a new work group, on the spur of the moment, he arrived at a labor camp in Magdeburg Germany, where he also managed to survive. There were 2,800 prisoners with him at Magdeburg, 400 remained when the Nazis dismantled the camp and returned its inhabitants to Buchenwald. Only 200 completed the journey, and when liberation day came only 40 survived, including the 17-year-old author.

    While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele and subjected to sadistic medical experiments and forced to fight daily for their own survival. Through this book, readers will learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil. The book also includes an epilogue on Eva's recovery from this experience and her remarkable decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Through her museum and her lectures, she has dedicated her life to giving testimony on the Holocaust, providing a message of hope for people who have suffered, and working toward goals of forgiveness, peace, and the elimination of hatred and prejudice in the world.

    When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Thomas Toivi Blatt was twelve years old. He and his family lived in the largely Jewish town of Izbica in the Lublin district of Poland—the district that was to become the site of three major Nazi extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek. Blatt tells of the chilling events that led to his deportation to Sobibor, and of the six months he spent there before taking part in the now-famous uprising and mass breakout. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five harrowing years spent eluding both the Nazis and anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is gripping account of resilience and survival. This edition also includes the author's interview with Karl Frenzel, a former Nazi commandant at Sobibor.

    After that, she moved in many worlds; In every one, she made her mark.Felice Massie was a student in France, caught up in the horrors of Naziism when she was 20 years old. Cut off by the war from her family living in a small village in Poland, she shifted from one country to another attempting to find a home for herself and a means to rescue her parents, brother, and sister. As the Holocaust descended on her shtetl, she arrived penniless in America. Over time she raised a family and amassed one of foremost collections of American modern art. Her boldness and resilience became a beacon of hope and inspiration for others.

    He was twenty-three, from Czechoslovakia; she was twenty, from Romania. Both had lost nearly everything in the war – yet in their chance encounter at sea, they found a new beginning. Three days later, on a train rattling across the Turkish countryside en route to Palestine, with no common language between them, they were married…and spent the rest of their lives together. Isadora had emerged from the brutal, frozen ghettos of Transnistria – known as the ‘Forgotten Cemetery’ of the Holocaust. Joshua had escaped from the Hungarian Army’s slave labor corps as his unit was being marched toward a train to Auschwitz. That either survived is incredible; that, of all possible fates, the war would toss them onto the same deck of the same boat at the same time is simply unbelievable – except that it happened. Here, their grandson, prize-winning author Michael Benanav, traces the improbable twists and turns that pulled Joshua and Isadora through the horrors of the Holocaust. As their families were destroyed and their own lives nearly lost, each element of their experiences – including a photograph of a Hungarian general; a mismatched pair of galoshes; a Romanian Orthodox priest; an SS officer’s wife; and maybe, on one occasion, an angel – proved crucial to getting them out of the war and onto that boat. Benanav vividly recounts the devastating events and astonishing coincidences that brought his grandparents together – while reckoning with the unsettling knowledge that without the Holocaust, his family would not exist. This is an extraordinary true story, rooted in the terrible tragedies and sudden strokes of serendipity that together are The Luck of the Jews. Praise for The Luck of The Jews (First published by Lyons Press as Joshua & Isadora: A True Tale of Loss & Love in the Holocaust): “Movingly written, Michael Benanav’s search for his grandparents’ tragic memories and experiences brings the reader closer to an ineffable truth that must not be forgotten.” – Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Winner, author of Night “A harrowing wartime saga [and] an intriguing record of Holocaust survival written with passion and authority.”–Publishers Weekly “A tale of suffering, romance and redemption in Israel… What stands out about this story is its ability to bring Southeastern Europe and Bessarabia, a southern Yiddish-speaking region in today’s Moldova, into focus. The narrative is highly imagistic, often relying on crisp depictions of Jews moving through the landscape to power a story of loss.” –The Jewish Daily Forward “Important and gripping.” –Hindustan Times About the Author Michael Benanav is a freelance writer and photojournalist whose work appears in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Geographical Magazine, Lonely Planet guidebooks, and other publications. His first book, Men Of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold, was nominated by Barnes & Noble for their Discover Great New Writers award and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association

    Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.

    Discovered one year ago in Italy and never before published in English, this poignant and extraordinarily well-written account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the institutionalized horror of Auschwitz. Through Sonnino's words, memory has the power to disarm these unspeakable evils.