Book picks similar to
Ghetto Diary by Janusz Korczak
history
holocaust
non-fiction
polish
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl - 1946
Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.
Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter
Kazik (Simha Rotem) - 1994
After their attempts to penetrate the Ghetto had failed, they decided to spare themselves casualties by destroying it from outside with cannon and aerial bombings. A few days later the Ghetto was totally destroyed. . . . The 'streets' were nothing but rows of smoldering ruins. It was hard to cross them without stepping on charred bodies."—Kazik When the Nazis decided to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, five hundred young Jewish fighters within the Ghetto rose up to defy them. With no weapons, no influence, and no experience in warfare, they managed to resist the Germans for almost a month. In the end, when the battle was lost, the surviving Jews were led out of the ruins through the sewers by a nineteen-year-old fighter known as Kazik. As head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which had planned and executed the uprising, Kazik spent the rest of the war helping to care for the several thousand Jews who still remained in Warsaw. This book—an extraordinary story of courage and perseverance—is Kazik's wartime memoir. In stark, spare detail, Kazik reports on the efforts to prepare for the defense of the Warsaw Ghetto, the calamitous battle with the Germans, and the rescue of the few Jews who were still alive after the Ghetto was destroyed. He describes how he assumed a false Aryan identity in order to pass through the city as he collected money and found hiding places for the survivors. Constantly on guard, fearful of informers, his life always in danger, he nevertheless plotted resourcefully to aid his fellow Jews. He tells how he joined the Poles during their ill-fated uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw in 1944, had further brushes with death assisting the Polish underground, and returned to Warsaw to watch its liberation by the Russian army. Suspenseful, moving, and remarkably heroic, Kazik's memoir is only the second source to be published on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It will help demolish the image of Jews as submissive victims in the Holocaust.
From Broken Glass: My Story of Finding Hope in Hitler's Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation
Steve Ross - 2018
On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in which German authorities ransacked Jewish-owned buildings with sledgehammers. Ross was eight years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish village, forcing his family to flee. He spent his next six years in a day-to-day struggle to survive the notorious camps in which he was imprisoned, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau among them. When he was finally liberated, he no longer knew how old he was, he was literally starving to death, and everyone in his family except for his brother had been killed. Ross learned in his darkest experiences--by observing and enduring inconceivable cruelty as well as by receiving compassion from caring fellow prisoners--the human capacity to rise above even the bleakest circumstances. He decided to devote himself to underprivileged youth, aiming to ensure that despite the obstacles in their lives they would never experience suffering like he had. Over the course of a nearly forty-year career as a psychologist working in the Boston city schools, that was exactly what he did. At the end of his career, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a site millions of people including young students visit every year. Equal parts heartrending, brutal, and inspiring, From Broken Glass is the story of how one man survived the unimaginable and helped lead a new generation to forge a more compassionate world.
The Young Hitler I Knew
August Kubizek - 1973
This book tells the story of their extraordinary friendship, and gives fascinating insight into Hitler's character during these formative years.
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.
Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz
Michael Bornstein - 2017
Survivors Club tells the unforgettable story of how a father’s courageous wit, a mother’s fierce love, and one perfectly timed illness saved Michael’s life, and how others in his family from Zarki, Poland, dodged death at the hands of the Nazis time and again with incredible deftness. Working from his own recollections as well as extensive interviews with relatives and survivors who knew the family, Michael relates his inspirational story with the help of his daughter, Debbie Bornstein Holinstat. Shocking, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, this narrative nonfiction offers an indelible depiction of what happened to one Polish village in the wake of the German invasion in 1939.
From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck
Timothy Braatz - 2011
Through family connections, a Jewish teenager named Anatol Chari became a ghetto policeman. Because they were sometimes viewed as collaborators, ghetto policemen who survived the war kept their past a secret. In From Ghetto to Death Camp, Chari reveals that hidden story, describing the policemen’s duties—guarding food, rounding up prisoners for transport—and the privileges it brought them. Those privileges ended when the ghetto population was transported to Auschwitz. As a slave laborer, Chari went on to various work camps, endured long marches and an Allied bombing raid, and ended up in the Bergen-Belsen death camp. To survive the camps, he now says, you needed help, smarts, and most of all luck. He depicts a seemingly senseless world where guards could be decent or cruel, where some prisoners were sent to hospitals and others to gas chambers, and where food was everything. Written with remarkable honesty and unexpected wit, this unique memoir is in many ways a reflection on the human condition.
This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz
Piera Sonnino - 2004
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.
From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary
Robert Clary - 2001
He was deported to the Nazi concentration camps in 1942 but miraculously was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, the only one of thirteen deported family members to survive. At age 22, a song he recorded, "Put Your Shoes on Lucy," became a big hit in the United States. He appeared in Cabaret on Broadway, in motion pictures including The Hindenburg with George C. Scott, and in nightclubs. On television he was well-loved for roles on "The Young and the Restless," "Days of our Lives," and of course, as Corporal Louis Lebeau on "Hogan's Heroes." As a Holocaust survivor, Clary has lectured at high schools, colleges, synagogues, and civic groups throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Things We Couldn't Say
Diet Eman - 1994
The true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman who, with her fiance, Hein Siestma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II.
Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe
Leo Bretholz - 1998
He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid in attics, cellars, anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety. First he swam the River Sauer at the German-Belgian border. Later he climbed the Alps on feet so battered they froze to his socks--only to be turned back at the Swiss border. He crawled out from under the barbed wire of a French holding camp, and hid in a village in the Pyrenees while gendarmes searched it. And in the dark hours of one November morning, he escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz. Leap into Darkness is the sweeping memoir of one Jewish boy's survival, and of the family and the world he left behind.
Hanged at Auschwitz: An Extraordinary Memoir of Survival
Sim Kessel - 1972
Kessel, a member of the French Resistance, was arrested by the SS at age 23. He was tortured, sent to work in mines, and dumped into a series of work and death camps. While he was being hung, the rope miraculously broke, so he was sentenced to be shot. Instead, he fooled his captors by assuming the identity of another prisoner and lived to tell the tale.
Bread or Death: Memories of My Childhood During and After the Holocaust
Milton Mendel Kleinberg - 2014
"Alle raise," (everybody out), the German soldiers screamed as they pounded on our door with the butts of their rifles. And thus began a 4,500-mile journey from Poland through Russia and Siberia and eventually to Uzbekistan in Central Asia, as the author's family used bribery and darkness of night to flee as the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Young Mendel, from age four to fourteen, tells in vivid detail the wretched journey in cramped cattle cars through frigid Russia, the indignities of being forced labor, the shame of begging for bread just to survive, and death of those closest to him. The family s plight includes abandonment, hunger, and separation (and later remarkable twists of fate and reunion) quite unlike other Holocaust stories. This coming-of-age, Holocaust memoir is the author's personal account of how through great sacrifices by his mother he managed to survive the worst atrocities in human history and his uncertain days in a Polish Children's Home, scrabbling for fallen fruit, and surviving kidnapping and murder on the Black Road, and return to German Displaced Persons camps at war's end. But to what fate? Originally written as a memoir just for his grandchildren, Milton Kleinberg gives a moving account of his family s hardships and eventual immigration with a lump-in-the-throat passage to America past the Statue of Liberty and into a land of opportunity tinged with bigotry yet with a promise to future generations. This book for young adults has been reviewed by the Institute for Holocaust Education and includes a glossary, a book club discussion guide, a timeline, and a Teacher's Guide.
Queen of the Bremen: The True Story of an American Child Trapped in Germany During World War II
Marlies Adams Difante - 2012
As the SS Bremen leaves New York Harbor with Marlies and her family as passengers, Marlies has no idea that what is intended to be a three-month stay will turn into a seven-year struggle to stay alive in a living hell.No one could have predicted the events that are about to unfold as the Bremen docks in Bremerhaven, Germany six days later. As World War II begins, Hitler comes into power, and all borders and ports are closed; the Adams family is prohibited from leaving Germany-now a Nazi-controlled country. In her compelling autobiography, Marlies chronicles a little girl's unforgettable journey through starvation, bone-chilling cold, prejudice, bombings, abuse, homelessness, and fear instigated by an evil dictator.Narrated with candor and many historical details that bring her memoir to life, Marlies shares the tragic yet inspirational story of how she endured a childhood in wartime Germany by relying on her own sheer will, faith, and the unconditional love of a most unusual, yet devoted best friend.
A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir
Lev Golinkin - 2014
In the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past.Lev Golinkin's memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It's also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible . . . and say thank you. Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir—it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat—and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.