His firsthand account of his wartime service gives a graphic insight into his lethal skill with a rifle and into the desperate fight put up by Soviet forces to defend Leningrad. He also records how, during the three-year siege, close members of this family died, including his wife and two sons, as well as many of his comrades in arms. He describes these often-terrible events with such honesty and clarity that his memoir is remarkable.Piluyshin, who lived in Leningrad with his family, was already 35 years old when the war broke out and he was drafted. He started in the Red Army as a scout, but once he had demonstrated his marksmanship and steady nerve, he became a sniper. He served throughout the Leningrad siege, from the late 1941 when the Wehrmachts advance was halted just short of the city to its liberation during the Soviet offensive of 1944. His descriptions of grueling front-line life, of his fellow soldiers and of his sniping missions are balanced by his vivid recollections of the protracted suffering of Leningrads imprisoned population and of the grief that was visited upon him and his family.His gripping narrative will be fascinating reading for any one who is keen to learn about the role and technique of the sniper during the Second World War. It is also a memorable eyewitness account of one mans experience on the Eastern Front.

    In a deeply moving second-generation Holocaust memoir, Goldberg introduces the extraordinary story of Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—among the Resistance and at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation—that the Guardian newspaper judged “worthy of a film script.”As astonishing as Hilde’s story is, Rita herself emerges as the central, fascinating character in this utterly unique account. Proud of her mother and yet struggling to forge an identity in the shadow of such heroic accomplishments (in a family setting that included close relationships with the iconic Frank family), Rita Goldberg reveals a little-explored aspect of Holocaust survival: the often-wrenching family and interpersonal struggles of the children and grandchildren whose own lives are haunted by historic tragedy.Motherland is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research. It is an epic story of survival, adventure, and new life.

     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.

    Glory Denied: The Saga of Jim Thompson, America's Longest-Held Prisoner of War

    In this book, Weisman tells the story of the final years of the iconic entertainer from within his exclusive inner circle--featuring original photos and filled with scintillating revelations that fans of all Sinatra stages--from the crooner to the Duets--will love.

    In the Great War, when fliers were still "knights of the air," Luke was an ungallant loner, a kid from Arizona who collected tarantulas, shot buzzards, and boxed miners. But during two torrid weeks in September 1918, he was the deadliest man on the Western Front. In only ten missions, he destroyed fourteen heavily-defended German balloons and four airplanes, a rampage unequaled even by the dreaded von Richtofen, and the second highest American tally of the entire war. Cocksure and constantly reprimanded, Luke was actually under arrest on the day of his final flight, but he stole a plane to join the fatal action that won him the first Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to a pilot. Blaine Pardoe retraces and refreshes Frank Luke's story through recently discovered correspondence. What emerges is a portrait of a life out of an "Old West" that was, by the late Teens, colliding with modernity. Frantic, short, and splendid, the life of Frank Luke, Jr. dramatizes the tragic intervention of an American spirit in the war that devastated Europe.

    On one occasion Mary delivered a Wellington bomber to an airfield, and as she climbed out of the aircraft the RAF ground crew ran over to her and demanded to know where the pilot was! Mary said simply: ‘I am the pilot!’ Unconvinced the men searched the aircraft before they realized a young woman had indeed flown the bomber all by herself.After the war she accepted a secondment to the RAF, being chosen as one of the first pilots, and one of only three women, to take the controls of the new Meteor fast jet. By 1950 the farmer's daughter from Oxfordshire with a natural instinct to fly became Europe's first female air commandant.In this authorized biography the woman who says she kept in the background during her ATA years and left all the glamour of publicity to her colleagues, finally reveals all about her action-packed career which spans almost a century of aviation, and her love for the skies which, even in her nineties, never falters.She says: ‘I am passionate for anything fast and furious. I always have been since the age of three and I always knew I would fly. The day I stepped into a Spitfire was a complete joy and it was the most natural thing in the world for me.’

    The atrocities unleashed by the Nazi regime were unprecedented; families were torn apart, millions were murdered, and a cloud of fear cast over the world. But somewhere, love and hope remained ignited. World War II Love Stories tells the unforgettable stories of those couples brought together by war. They are enduring tales of great love, intense passion, and often tragedy, but most of all they are tales that celebrate the human spirit at its time of greatest trial.

    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.

    Paula, a polyglot architect, and Meir, a textile industrialist, fled with their only child, Israel, to Vilnius, Lithuania, and later to Bialystok, attempting to save themselves from certain death in the extermination camps. In the midst of terror, there they found grace In August 1943, the Bialystok Ghetto was emptied by the Nazis and all its occupants were sent to extermination. The Steins had managed to remain hidden in the Ghetto for five more weeks, before escaping to their new hideout—the home of a Polish family, backed by a German official, that gave them refuge. They remained hidden there for nearly a year, until the war ended, with the daily danger of being discovered and sent to death. They lived to see Bialystok liberated by the Russian Red Army, and eventually settled in the new state of Israel. The events of the Holocaust as they were seen through the eyes of a real middle-class Polish Jewish family Architecture of Survival brings forward the diaries Paula and Meir Stein wrote while in hideout during the Second World War, accompanied by the vivid visual memories of their son, Israel Stein, who witnessed the horrors as a child. It is a rare historical documentation, read in bated breath. Get your copy of Architecture of Survival now!

    

    In the following twenty-three years she experienced many of the terrors of her fellowEuropean Jews: early Nazi oppression in Berlin; post-"Anschluss" Vienna; Nazi occupied Prague; and deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the truehorrors of the Nazi "Final Solution" awaited her in Birkenau, the woman's concentration camp where she survived her internment, beginning in January, 1943, for two years. These months of hell were followed by a "Death March" and incarceration in Ravensbrück from which she and a group of fellow inmates walked away to freedom.As Professor Emerita in German literature at UNC-Charlotte, Dr. Cernyak-Spatz continues to teach and to lecture about the Holocaust. This book is a rare firsthand testament of a Holocaust survivor. The audiobook version, narrated by the author, is now available on her website.

    These men were leaders of the Gestapo, the secret police during the times of the Nazis. This book outlines who the Gestapo were, how they operated, what their numbers were, the terrible crimes they committed and how they paid for these in the end when they were hunted down after the war.

    Like countless citizens under Hitler’s regime, Margarete struggled to understand what was happening to her country. Later, as a nurse for the German Red Cross, she treated countless young soldiers—recruited in the eleventh hour to fight a losing battle—they would die before her eyes as Allied bombs racked her beloved city. Yet, her deep humanity, intelligence, and passion for life—which sparkles in every sentence of her memoir—carried Margarete through to war’s end. But just when she thought the worst was over, and she and her mother were on a train headed to Sweden, they were suddenly rerouted deep into Russia…This powerful account draws back the curtain on a piece of history that has been largely overlooked—the nightmare that millions of German civilians suffered, simply because they were German. That Margarete survived to tell her tale so vividly and courageously is a gift to us all.

    After the war, Gretel fell in love with a British officer. When he was transferred back to England, her determination and bravery were tested once more.