It also illuminates the chaotic life of a nation during the Stalin era.

    Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

     Just over a month later they engaged five enemy destroyers and sunk three of them and received no damage themselves in what has been described by tacticians as “near perfect surface actions”. Over the course of the next four months Destroyer Squadron 23, which was nicknamed “The Little Beavers, would continue in the same vein and engage with enemy ships a further twenty-two times, destroying one Japanese cruiser, nine destroyers, one submarine, several smaller ships, and approximately 30 aircraft. “The Captains of Squadron 23 went out looking for trouble; they found it; they sank it; and then they looked for more. When a ship became lost, as some did, she simply headed for the enemy and continued to fight by herself. It is impossible for me to express the proud, paternal feeling I felt for you all during the heat of battle. There are many officers in the United States Navy who probably would have done as well had the opportunity been granted them. There are NO officers in the United States Navy who could have done better.” — Captain Arleigh Burke Ken Jones’ account of this brilliant squadron takes the reader to the heart of the action as he uncovers Arleigh’s tactics and the strategies that were deployed to defeat Japanese ships. He also uncovers what life was like for the men in the squadron as they powered across Pacific Ocean. “While the period covered by this book is relatively short, it was a crucial period in the Pacific War, and the vital part played by Destroyer Squadron 23 under the inspiring leadership of Arleigh Burke was, in a sense, only a beginning, but the vital beginning, of a steady drive forward which gained momentum and power until United States naval forces steamed victoriously into Tokyo Bay.” — Fleet Admiral William Halsey Ken Jones wrote a number of works on World War Two, including the biography Admiral Arleigh. His book Destroyer Squadron 23 was first published in 1959.

    Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch—a bar mitzvah gift—he had buried in his backyard before they left.

    This fascinating work by James E. Young examines Holocaust monuments and museums in Europe, Israel, and America, exploring how every nation remembers the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals, and experiences, and how these memorials reflect their place in contemporary aesthetic and architectural discourse. The result is a groundbreaking study of Holocaust memory, public art, and their fusion in contemporary life.Among the issues Young discusses are: how memorials suppress as much as they commemorate; how museums tell as much about their makers as about events; the differences between memorials conceived by victims and by victimizers; and the political uses and abuses of officially cast memory. Young describes, for example, Germany's "counter monuments," one of which was designed to disappear over time, and the Polish memorials that commemorate the whole of Polish destruction through the figure of its murdered Jewish part. He compares European museums and monuments that focus primarily on the internment and killing process with Israeli memorials that include portrayals of Jewish life before and after the destruction. In his concluding chapters, he finds that American Holocaust memorials are guided no less by distinctly American ideals, such as liberty and pluralism.Interweaving graceful prose and arresting photographs, the book is eloquent testimony to the way varied cultures and nations commemorate an era that breeds guilt, shame, pain, and amnesia, but rarely pride. By reinvigorating these memorials with the stories of their origins, Young highlights the ever-changing life of memory over its seemingly frozen face in the landscape.

    In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. In this so-called Witness House, perpetrators and victims confronted each other in a microcosm that reflected the events of the high court. Presiding over the affair was the beautiful Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky (a woman so blond and enticing that she was described as a Jean Harlowe look-alike) who took great pride in her ability to keep the household civil and the communal dinners pleasant.  A comedy of manners arose among the guests as the urge to continue battle was checked by a sudden and uncomfortable return to civilized life.   The trial atmosphere extends to the small group in the villa.  Agitated victims confront and avoid perpetrators and sympathizers, and high-ranking officers in the German armed forces struggle to keep their composure. This highly explosive mixture is seasoned with vivid, often humorous, anecdotes of those who had basked in the glory of the inner circles of power. Christiane Kohl focuses on the guilty, the sympathizers, the undecided, and those who always manage to make themselves fit in.  The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

    Approved by both the Anne Frank House Foundation in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel, run by the Frank family, this work of literary criticism unravels the complex, fascinating story of the diary and effectively makes the case for it being a work of art from a precociously gifted writer.

    Includes a 40-minute DVD with video testimony from survivors. Photos.

    She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, and managed to survive. She tells this story with style and power." --Kirkus Reviews

    The heaviest burden. An old man has for many years borne a weight that runs deeper than survivor’s guilt. He is a survivor, of humanity’s darkest hour, but wouldn’t have lived through it if not for the actions of another. Now he has the opportunity for which he has long yearned: to meet his saviour’s daughter and tell her about her father’s supreme act of selflessness. And maybe, in the telling, one of them will find release.

    Drawing on research he and other historians have done in recent years, he offers fresh opinions on such basic issues as how to define and explain the Holocaust; whether it can be compared with other genocides; how Jews reacted to the murder campaign against them; and what the relationship is between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.The Holocaust says something terribly important about humanity, says Bauer. He analyzes explanations of the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Goetz Aly, Daniel Goldhagen, John Weiss, and Saul Friedländer and then offers his own interpretation of how the Holocaust could occur. Providing fascinating narratives as examples, he deals with reactions of Jewish men and women during the Holocaust and tells of several attempts at rescue operations. He also explores Jewish theology of the Holocaust, arguing that our view of the Holocaust should not be clouded by mysticism: it was an action by humans against other humans and is therefore an explicable event that we can prevent from recurring.

    The mass of data available about World War II has never been as large as it is now, yet it has become extraordinarily complicated to interpret it in a meaningful way, and to share that analysis with the public. Infographics allow data to be comprehensible to the general reader while still satisfying demands for the rigorous approach of a historian.The result is breathtaking. For the first time, it is possible to easily connect the dots between various interrelated aspects of World War II that were previously examined separately. Encompassing the conflict from its roots to aftermath, this book covers more than sixty themes, including arms production, Operation Barbarossa, how America took back the Pacific, and the Nazi concentration-camp system. The result is an extraordinary new approach to World War II, which is sure to appeal to those looking for an overview of the war and to history buffs alike.

    Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Through revealing stories of significant events and of ordinary individuals—pioneers, immigrants, entrepreneurs, scientists, army generals, peaceniks, settlers, and Palestinians—Israeli journalist Ari Shavit illuminates many of the pivotal moments of the Zionist century that led Israel to where it is today. We meet the youth group leader who recognized the potential of Masada as a powerful symbol for Zionism; the young farmer who bought an orange grove from his Arab neighbor in the 1920s, and with the Jaffa orange helped to create a booming economy in Palestine; the engineer who was instrumental in developing Israel’s nuclear program; the religious Zionists who started the settler movement. Over an illustrious career that has spanned almost thirty years, Shavit has had rare access to people from across the Israeli political, economic, and social spectrum, and in this ambitious work he tells a riveting story that is both deeply human and of profound historical dimension.As it examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, My Promised Land asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? And can Israel survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is currently facing, both internal and external, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. The result is a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

    

    From the unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger, to the budding relationships of an adolescent girl growing into womanhood during the worst of all times, the author withholds nothing. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's subtle depiction of her parents knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them, and their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, lead us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances as father, mother, or daughter. Love in a World of Sorrow features Fanya's gripping tale of survival and an updated foreword and epilogue by the author, reflecting more than a decade of experience bearing witness to the Holocaust before hundreds of audiences around the world. On the reading list at Princeton University, the University of Connecticut, and Ben Gurion Univesity of the Negev, among others. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's book is an indispensable educational tool for teaching future generations about the human potential for both good and evil.