The Last Train: A Holocaust Story
Rona Arato - 2013
Hungary is allied with Germany to protect its citizens from invasion, but in 1944 Hitler breaks his promise to keep the Nazis out of Hungary.The Nazi occupation forces the family into situations of growing panic and fear: first into a ghetto in their hometown; then a labor camp in Austria; and, finally, to the deadly Bergen Belsen camp deep in the heart of Germany. Separated from their father, 6-year-old Paul and 11-year-old Oscar must care for their increasingly sick mother, all while trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy amid the horrors of the camp.In the spring of 1945, the boys see British planes flying over the camp, and a spark of hope that the war will soon end ignites. And then, they are forced onto a dark, stinking boxcar by the Nazi guards. After four days on the train, the boys are convinced they will be killed, but through a twist of fate, the train is discovered and liberated by a battalion of American soldiers marching through Germany.The book concludes when Paul, now a grown man living in Canada, stumbles upon photographs on the internet of his train being liberated. After writing to the man who posted the pictures, Paul is presented with an opportunity to meet his rescuers at a reunion in New York — but first he must decide if he is prepared to reopen the wounds of his past.
The Long Road to Auschwitz
Anthony Vincent Bruno - 2019
Max is a British Territorial soldier and Zia is a Jewess from the south of France. Zia's grandmother is a wealthy socialite who owns a painting that could embarrass the Nazis. Zia is kidnapped by the Gestapo and Max is hospitalised on the same day. He awakes to find no trace of his beloved who he had planned to marry in England. The Red Cross reported that it was almost certain that Zia was trafficked across the border and delivered to Sachsenhausen Labour Camp at Oranienburg, not far from Berlin on the night of May 26th, 1939. A criminal act, regardless of the forthcoming war. The first warring Germans to step over the border onto French soil did not do so until May 13th, 1940. The Gestapo had kidnapped her 343 days before they attacked France.June 6th, 1944 - four years later, Max is one of 150,000 Allied troops headed towards the Normandy beaches. He has two options - find the woman he could never forget or kill the people responsible for her death. From the very beginning, Berlin had ordered SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Baumann to deal harshly with their VIP captive but never to kill her. Through three concentration camps, ending in Auschwitz, Zia wishes she had been killed many times over. Traumatized, she has no idea that Max and a few unlikely friends are battling their way through Nazi occupied Europe in a crazy attempt to rescue her. Berlin tries one last ploy to get their hands on her grandmother's painting. Zia's life hangs in the balance when Max meets his own personal nemesis in the guise of an undercover Gestapo officer. This novel explores the dark depths that humans can sink to in times of war. It is for adults only and even then; it is not for readers of a sensitive disposition. Whatever you read in this novel of extraordinary graphic Holocaust content, consider this – it was immeasurably worse, a hundred thousand times so.
Intrepid's Last Case
William Stevenson - 1983
They concluded that the rumors grew, ironically, from Intrepid's last wartime case involving the first major Soviet intelligence defector of the new atomic age: Igor Gouzenko. Intrepid saved Gouzenko and found him sanctuary inside a Canadian spy school. Gouzenko was about to make more devastating disclosures than those concerning atomic espionage when the case was mysteriously terminated and Intrepid's organization dissolved.Unraveling the implications of Gouzenko's defection and Intrepid's removal from the case, tracing the steps of Dick Ellis and disclosing much new information regarding United States and Canadian postwar intelligence activities, Intrepid's Last Case is a story that for sheer excitement rivals the best spy fiction--and is all the more important because every word is true.Filled with never-before-revealed facts on the Soviet/Western nuclear war dance and a compelling portrayal of the mind of a professional spy, Intrepid's Last Case picks up where the first book ended, at the very roots of the cold war. It describes one of the most widespread cover-ups and bizarre betrayals in intelligence history. This is the incredible Intrepid against the KGB.
Surviving The Forest
Adiva Geffen - 2019
Shurka, her beloved husband and their two small children lived in a pretty house in a village in Poland, surrounded by a little garden with lilies. This was their life and nothing could harm it, or so they thought…WWII broke out and though the happy family thought the Germans would never reach their idyllic village, they quickly understood they were wrong and their happiness came to a brutal end. The family had to flee their house and find shelter in a neighboring Ghetto where they realized that the Gestapo was taking Jews away on trucks every night, and they were never seen again.The family decided to escape into the deep dark forest. There, surrounded by animals, they knew that this was their only chance to get away from the real beasts. They had no idea what would await them, but they knew that doing nothing was not an option if they wanted to survive.
Save Me Twice
E.A. Dustin - 2016
After spending months digging trenches as a deterrent for Russian tanks, Karl and his brother are captured by the Russians. Known for their atrocities, Karl in immense danger, flees Russian captivity and surrenders to the Americans. What happens to his brother? As an American POW Karl helps clean up Mauthausen-Gusen, where he finds his neighborhood friend Michael whose entire family had gone missing. Karl remains in American prison camp for five months: will the American GIs set him free or hand him over to the Russians? The Russians are demanding that prisoners in their territory are handed back. Will Karl make it home alive?
The Heroes of Sainte-Mère-Église
J.D. Keene - 2019
He waits with the German war machine for the order from Adolf Hitler to start the western Blitzkrieg--the "lightning war."Six hundred kilometers away, WWI veteran René Legrand plows his fields. He is enjoying the life he has made with his wife and two sons in the peaceful village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Since the end of the last war, he has tried to forget the atrocities he'd witnessed. Most of all, he has tried to forget the horrors he inflicted on others as the deadliest assassin the French Army has ever known, unaware he will soon need the skills of war he once used to perfection.His youngest son, Jean-Pierre, lives the life of a typical thirteen-year-old. He attends school, helps his father in the fields, and tries not to be nervous around the mesmerizing Angelique Lapierre. Events will soon force him to become a man, and along with his father, brother, and a small group of citizens, they harass their German occupiers and help the Allies prepare for the D-Day invasion.Guilty of nothing other than being a Jew, Jean-Pierre's best friend, Alfred Shapiro, flees to Spain with his family. They hope to make it through the treacherous Pyrenees Mountains before the Nazis capture them.Working with the French Resistance, Gabrielle Hall uses her beauty and cunning to obtain military intelligence from the Nazi officers who frequent her café.In Fort Benning, Georgia, Captain James Gavin discusses a plan with Major William Lee to begin the U.S. Army's first parachute brigade. Four years later, General "Jumpin' Jim" Gavin will descend through the night sky and into Normandy, France, along with the greatest invasion force the world has ever seen.These and others are the heroes of Sainte-Mère-Église.
Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete
Patrick Leigh Fermor - 2014
He and Captain Billy Moss hatched a daring plan to abduct the general, while ensuring that no reprisals were taken against the Cretan population.Dressed as German military police, they stopped and took control of Kreipe's car, drove through twenty-two German checkpoints, then succeeded in hiding from the German army before finally being picked up on a beach in the south of the island and transported to safety in Egypt on 14 May.Abducting a General is Leigh Fermor's own account of the kidnap, published for the first time. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by acclaimed SOE historian Professor Roderick Bailey, it is a glorious first-hand account of one of the great adventures of the Second World War.Also included in this book are Leigh Fermor's intelligence reports, sent from caves deep within Crete yet still retaining his remarkable prose skills, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations vividly alive, as well as the peril which the SOE and Resistance were operating under; and a guide to the journey that Kreipe was taken on from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site so that the modern visitor can relive this extraordinary event.
The Auschwitz Kommandant: A Daughter's Search for the Father She Never Knew
Barbara U. Cherish - 2009
Depicting her father’s ascension to command Auschwitz, the most infamous of all concentration camps, the author reveals his relationship with his family, his unceasing love for his mistress, and the very separate life he led as a senior officer of the S.S. Chronicling his capture at the end of the war, this narrative also documents his imprisonment at Dachau and Nuremburg, his sentencing at the Auschwitz Trial in Krakow, and his subsequent execution. Recounting a shocking tale with clarity and without judgment, this riveting autobiography embodies one woman’s unwavering mission to resolve her own past.
Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Israel Gutman - 1994
They were to kill those who resisted. A few hundred of the trapped Jews, mostly teenagers, armed only with pistols, Molotov cocktails, and a few light machine guns, vowed to fight back. Resistance is the full story of the uprising and the events leading to it, told by a survivor of the battle who is now a world-renowned Israeli scholar of the Holocaust. Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s was the home of Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. It included the rich, the poor, and the middle class; casual assimilationists and ardent Zionists; representatives of the full spectrum of political and religious factions. Then came the German onslaught of ruthless violence against the Jews - isolation and starvation amid desperation and disease - then deportations. As the ghetto walls rose, hundreds of thousands were rounded up and sent to Treblinka. But resistance began to take shape, and when the final attack order came, the ghetto fighters stood ready. One of the few survivors of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, Holocaust scholar I. Gutman draws on diaries, personal letters, and underground press reports in this compelling, authoritative account of a landmark event in Jewish history. Here, too, is a portrait of the vibrant culture that shaped the young fighters, whose inspired defiance would have far-reaching implications for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.Supported by moving and dramatic excerpts from diaries, letters, and other documents of the period, Resistance is destined to take its place as the classic account of a most important turning point in Jewish and world history.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941
William L. Shirer - 1941
Shirer was virtually unknown in 1940 when he decided there might be a book in the diary he had kept in Europe during the 1930s—specifically those sections dealing with the collapse of the European democracies and the rise of Nazi Germany.Berlin Diary first appeared in 1941, and the timing was perfect. The energy, the passion, the electricity in it were palpable. The book was an instant success, and it became the frame of reference against which thoughtful Americans judged the rush of events in Europe. It exactly matched journalist to event: the right reporter at the right place at the right time. It stood, and still stands, as so few books have ever done—a pure act of journalistic witness.
Belly of the Beast: POW's Inspiring True Story Faith Courage Survival Aboard Infamous WWII Japanese
Judith L. Pearson - 2001
More than 1,100 of them would be dead by journey’s end... The son of a Kentucky sharecropper and an enlistee in the Navy’s medical corps, Myers arrived in Manilla shortly before the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the other six targets of the Imperial Japanese military. While he and his fellow corpsmen tended to the bloody tide of soldiers pouring into their once peaceful Naval hospital, the Japanese overwhelmed the Pacific islands, capturing 78,000 POWs by April 1942. Myers was one of the first captured.After a brutal three-year encampment, Myers and his fellow POWs were forced onto an enemy hell ship bound for Japan. Suffocation, malnutrition, disease, dehydration, infestation, madness, and simple despair claimed the lives of nearly three quarters of those who boarded "the beast".Myers survived.A compelling account of a rarely recorded event in military history, this is more than Estel Myers’ true story—this is an homage to the unfailing courage of men at war, an inspiring chronicle of self-sacrifice and endurance, and a tribute to the power of faith, the strength of the soul, and the triumph of the human spirit. "An inspiring look at one of World War II's darkest hours." —James Bradley, Author of Flags of our Fathers and Flyboys "A searing chronicle." —Kirkus Reviews"The Belly of the Beast (is)...a searing tribute...(to) America in its bleakest hour." —Senator John McCain, author New York Times bestseller Faith of My Fathers
Dunkirk
Ewan Butler - 2017
The victories won by British arms in the years which followed that great deliverance have made men forget those soldiers – the first of the many – upon whom it fell to withstand the shock of Hitler’s great attack. It is now fitting that these men and their Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort, should be worthily remembered, and their story fully told, from those first landings in France, in the autumn of 1939, until the climax of Dunkirk. The authors, both professional writers, themselves served as officers with the B.E.F., and have recaptured the gallantry and comradeship of that little force. The result is a moving story of courage and devotion in the face of odds which no other British Force has ever been called upon to face. It is chivalrous to admire a gallant enemy, and of that chivalry we have lately seen much. Justice demands that the courage and devotion of our own fighting men be no less clearly recognised. There were no medals for the B.E.F., hardly even today the laurels of memory. They were soldiers, doing a soldier’s job against odds which no British Force had ever been called upon to face, and which, it is to be hoped, no British Force will ever face again. What were they then, the men of that small Expeditionary Force, a mere army in one of the groups of French armies? How did they spend the months of what has been called the “twilight war”, and how, when the shock of battle came at last, did they withstand the blow? Dunkirk tells the true story of those brave men who fought to save the lives of so many. With the 2017 movie release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk now is the time to remember the real history of the battle in the words of those who experienced it. Lt. Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford M.B.E., M.C. served in France as young officers during the last months of 1939 and the first five of 1940 with that small British Expeditionary force commanded by Lord Gort, which first faced the full might of Nazi Germany. Dunkirk was first published in 1950 under the title Keep The Memory Green. It was used as inspiration for the 1958 film, Dunkirk, starring Richard Attenborough.
The Day the Nazis Came - The Astonishing True Story of a Childhood Journey from the Occupied Channel Islands to the Dark Heart of a German Prison Camp
Stephen Matthews - 2016
He had seen men die in front of him and walked with Jewish prisoners straight off the cattle-trucks from Bergen- Belsen. He had nearly drowned, narrowly avoided being savaged by Alsatian guard dogs, been beaten by a pathological member of the SS and had his hand broken by a guard whilst attempting to feed a Russian prisoner.The family kept going through three and a half years of imprisonment, reinforced by their strong sense of survival and their loving support for each other, before a dramatic and violent liberation by Allied forces ended their ordeal. Yet when they were eventually returned to Guernsey, it was to find that their tranquil home had been stricken and scarred by Nazi occupation.Told through Steven Matthews’ own memories, as well as writing from his mother’s diaries and previously unpublished photographs, The Day the Nazis Came is an utterly unique memoir. Depicting the world of Nazi prison camps through the eyes of a child – a world in which the real dangers often seemed trivial and every day was a new adventure – it tells not just of the prisoners’ plight, but provides an important and poignant reminder that not every German soldier was cruel and hateful. Above all, it pays tribute to the preciousness of childhood, and shows that human kindness may flower in the unlikeliest of places.
The Third Reich in 100 Objects: A Material History of Nazi Germany
Roger Moorhouse - 2017
Tells the history of the Nazi regime from a fascinating new perspective” (Military History Monthly). Hitler’s Third Reich is covered in countless books and films: no conflict of the twentieth century has prompted such interest or such a body of literature. Here, two leading World War II historians offer a new way to look at the subject—through objects that come from this time and place, much like a museum exhibit. The photographs gathered by the authors represent subjects including the methamphetamine known as Pervitin, Hitler’s Mercedes, jackboots, concentration camp badges, a 1932 election poster, Wehrmacht mittens, Hitler’s grooming kit, the Tiger Tank, fragments of flak, and, of course, the swastika and Mein Kampf, among dozens more—along with informative text that sheds new light on both the objects themselves and the history they represent.
The Darkest Hour: WWII Tales of Resistance
Roberta KaganJohn R. McKay - 2018
When the world falls to terror and tyranny reigns… ...how far would you go to resist? Would you risk your own life or the lives of the ones you love? From a young Jewish woman in love fighting her way out of the Warsaw ghetto, to a Czech assassin rising above his fears for an attempt on a Nazi Hangman’s life, to a daughter who vows to avenge her family by taking down a Japanese commander, and a French boy's touching act of defiance no matter how small. Come and get a glimpse of the invisible side of WWII - the Resistance, those who refuse to bow down to brutality. Hold your breath and hope for the best in the darkest of times, when our heroes and heroines risk all to defy evil so the light of freedom will shine over their countries again. This collection includes ten never before published novellas by ten of today’s bestselling WWII historical fiction authors. Foreword by Terry Lynn Thomas, author of The Silent Woman, the USA Today Bestseller. Featured Stories: Bubbe’s Nightingale by Roberta Kagan Catriona’s War by Jean Grainger Reluctant Informer by Marion Kummerow Killing the Hangman by Ellie Midwood The Moon Chaser by Alexa Kang Enemy at the Gate by Mary D. Brooks The Occupation by Deborah Swift Code Name Camille by Kathryn Gauci V for Victory by John R McKay Sound of Resistance by Ryan Armstrong *** All proceeds will be donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum In Washington DC ***