Surviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz


Eva Mozes Kor - 2009
    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.

Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans


Vivien Spitz - 2005
    This is the account of 23 men torturing and killing by experiment in the name of scientific research and patriotism. The book includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathiser tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. The doctors tell of experiments involving depriving concentration camp inmates of oxygen; freezing them; injecting them with malaria, typhus, and jaundice; amputating healthy limbs; forcing them to drink seawater for weeks at a time; and other horrors.

The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich


Howard Reich - 2006
    Someone was trying to kill her, "to put a bullet in my head," Sonia told anyone who would listen. Polish and Jewish, Sonia Reich had survived the Holocaust by staying always on the run. She and Howard's father, Robert, also a Holocaust survivor, had fled to America, moved to Chicago, and raised their young son to tell no one that they were Jewish. It was only after moving to Skokie, a town filled with Holocaust survivors, that his family would live as Jews. Still, his parents told Howard almost nothing about their past. The First and Final Nightmare… is Reich's moving and bittersweet memoir of growing up in Skokie, discovering an odd and personal American freedom in jazz, and his riveting, revealing investigation into his family's past and the nature of his mother's illness, called late-onset Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a poignant story of a mother and a son, a haunted past, and the irony of what may happen when that often repeated admonition to "never forget" becomes a curse.

Defiance: The Bielski Partisans


Nechama Tec - 1993
    Winner of the 1990 Christopher Award. 11 halftones; 2 line drawings.

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi


Neal Bascomb - 2009
    Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle (and whose rare surveillance photographs are published here for the first time). The capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out of Argentina to stand trial is the stunning conclusion to this thrilling historical account, told with the kind of pulse-pounding detail that rivals anything you'd find in great spy fiction.

Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto


Emmanuel Ringelblum - 1974
    Through anecdotes, stories, and notations - some as brief as "I was slapped today in Zlota Street" - there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for hygienic reasons, through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility. Emmanual Ringelblum was 39 when he began his notes. When the Germans first invaded Poland, Ringelblum, who could have stayed abroad and escaped, returned to Warsaw from Switzerland knowing that his was an historical event of importance for his people and a moment in time that must be forever a part of written history. As the recognized archivist of the Ghetto he gathered around him a staff, and assigned each to cover a specific part of Ghetto life. From these reports and this notes, he assembled his Journal. On March 7, 1944, Emmanual Ringelblum was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife, his son, and thirt-eight others who shared his hiding place.

The Kingdom of Auschwitz


Otto Friedrich - 1994
    . . .It is quite simply the best short account ever produced." --Paul JohnsonA short and thoroughly accurate history of the Auschwitz concentration camp, this compelling book is authoritative in its factual details, devastating in its emotional impact.

For Those I Loved


Martin Gray - 1971
    Who better to guide our understanding and give us hope than Martin Gray--a man who survived the worst of times, flourished, and still managed to find joy in living?Martin has come full circle since his boyhood world was turned upside down by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Overnight, the teenage Martin and his family were immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a nightmare of brutality, starvation, and death. Martin became a clever smuggler to help his family survive--until the "butchers" of Treblinka took his mother and brothers. Against impossible odds, Martin survived and returned to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As the Nazis incinerated the ghetto, he escaped to fight with the partisans, and then the Red Army.After the war, Martin made his way to New York. The cunning and skills he developed during the war enabled him to learn the language and create a successful business. At 35, he retired to France with a fortune and a beautiful Dutch wife, starting a family and living in happiness and peace. But his world was shattered once again by a forest fire that engulfed his fleeing family. In a tragic repeat of history, Martin alone survived.Martin Gray's past could be our future if we don't heed his call to be the change. In this 35th anniversary expanded edition of For Those I Loved, a book beloved by millions of readers worldwide, Martin reminds us that the past is connected to the present. Only we can ensure that history is not repeated.Martin Gray still lives in the South of France and has devoted his life to his family, writing, human rights, and environmental and cultural causes. He received the United Nations Dag Hammar-skjold Award and the Gold Medal of European Merit.

I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz


Gisella Perl - 1948
    Every individual story, every picture, every description is but a stone in that monument which will stand forever to remind the world of this shameful phase of history, and to ask of it vigilance, lest the events of these years be repeated.

Here My Home Once Stood: A Holocaust Memoir


Moyshe Rekhtman - 2008
    But his iron will and quick wit allowed him to survive when all seemed lost. Staging escapes from death camps and avoiding Nazi pursuit through the frozen Ukrainian countryside-all while facing the loss of his family, famine, constant threat of capture, torture, and execution - would be a monumental task for the strongest of men. Despite his mild manners, emaciated body, and poor vision, he evaded the death squads in Nazi-occupied Ukraine for four years. Moyshe's Holocaust memoir is a remarkable example of human fortitude during a time when many welcomed an end to their suffering.

Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto


Tilar J. Mazzeo - 2016
    While there, she reached out to the trapped Jewish families, going from door to door and asking the parents to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling them out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. Driven to extreme measures and with the help of a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and her star-crossed lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena ultimately smuggled thousands of children past the Nazis. She made dangerous trips through the city’s sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings.But Irena did something even more astonishing at immense personal risk: she kept secret lists buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend’s back garden. On them were the names and true identities of those Jewish children, recorded with the hope that their relatives could find them after the war. She could not have known that more than ninety percent of their families would perish.

Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust


Alexandra Zapruder - 2002
    The volume contains extensive excerpts from 15 diaries, ten of which have never before been translated and published in English. The diarists ranged in age from 12 to 22; some survived the Holocaust, but most perished. Taken together, their accounts of daily events and their often unexpected thoughts, ideas and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.

Edith's Story


Edith Velmans - 1998
    She also happened to be Jewish. In the same month that Anne Frank's family went into hiding, Edith was sent to live with a courageous Protestant family, took a new name, and survived by posing as a gentile. Ultimately one-third of the hidden Dutch Jews were discovered and murdered; most of Edith's family perished. Velmans's memoir is based on her teenage diaries, wartime letters, and reflections as an adult survivor. In recounting wartime events and the details of her feelings as the war runs its course, Edith's Story ultimately affirms life, love, and extraordinary courage. "The most vivid evocation of the experience of Nazi Occupation that I have ever read." - The Independent (London)

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities


Jean Améry - 1966
    In its every turn and crease, it bears the marks of the true." --Irving Howe, New Republic"This remarkable memoir...is the autobiography of an extraordinarily acute conscience. With the ear of a poet and the eye of a novelist, Amery vividly communicates the wonder of a philosopher--a wonder here aroused by the 'dark riddle' of the Nazi regime and its systematic sadism." --Jim Miller, Newsweek"Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him." --Jean AmeryAt the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival--mental, moral, and physical--through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual's fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision.

The Strange Ways of Providence In My Life


Krystyna Carmi - 2015
    Her childhood was filled with friends, both Polish and Ukrainian girls, that played games with her. She attended a Ukrainian school, participated in school celebrations; she lived a normal, everyday life. In her memoire, published after many years of silence, Krystyna Carmi shows the history of her family and her life. The book contains more than 100 pictures, taken by Krystyna’s father, a professional photographer, and sent it to their family in Israel before the war.Krystyna was gifted with an amazing memory and as such was able to recall the atmosphere of those days, describing in details the appearance of a household; and if that wasn’t enough, Krystyna Carmi writes about something very rare, the smells she remembered from childhood. Walking with her on the streets of pre-war Obertyn, we get to know the Jews, the Ukrainians, and the Poles and the social and material conditions of their lives, as well as their names and surnames. Krystyna Carmi paints a psychological portrait of these people; she writes about how they dressed, what they ate, what their attitude towards others was, and above all, towards God. She writes about things seemingly trivial, however when looking back, they are incredibly significant.But the happy childhood did not last long. The first days of war brought overall fear and panic, the entrance of Red Army soldiers to Obertyn, the arrest of Polish patriots, liquidation of Jewish shops, the gradual growth into a more difficult reality of occupation, the Hungarian army in Obertyn, Jews murdered by Ukrainians in the local towns, incredible photos of the members of the Jewish community, drowning in the Dniester by Ukrainians. However, the worst was still ahead of the Jewish community in Obertyn and her family. First, the Germans, then the Kołomyja ghetto. She was with her parents as well as her maternal and paternal grandfathers. The life conditions in which Obertyn Jews had to live are described in the poem Molasa ”" Ghetto Sweets; she shows in a fictile, detailed way, psychophysical suffering caused by hunger.People died in the ghetto because of hunger and physical exhaustion; their bodies were collected on a platform. These deaths do not escape the attention of a sensitive and suffering girl, who years later will write a poem with the title In Remembrance of Innocently Suffering People of Different Ages and Sexes from Kołomyja Ghetto; a picture of the platform will stay in her memory forever. "The open mouth and eyes of these human corpses have been hunting me all my life."Then she returned from the ghetto with her parents, and escaped from Obertyn, following by her sisters’ death, which she described in a very suggestive way in her poems: Black Kamionka Forest. Part I Testimony and Black Kamionka Forest. Part II Curse). Her parents’ death, hiding, hunger, thirst, fear for life, then indifference as time goes by because life is hard. It would be easier to part with the world, but The Strange Ways of Providence in her Life has chosen for her to live, to be. This is how you could present in short, the content of Krystyna Carmi’s memoire. The memoire are interspersed with the cover of Doctor Markus Willbach, a friend of the Sorger family to emphasize the authenticity of Krystyna Carmi’s (maiden name: Sorger) memories as the images, situations, and events witnessed by her as a little girl coincide with Doctor Willbach’s account, an a