Told with humour and insight, it looks back across the decades at the life of this close knit, notorious East End family. Maureen Flanagan, a then 20 year old hairdresser started visiting the Kray family home in Vallance Road each week to give the twins’ mother, Violet, her weekly shampoo and set. Over the cups of tea and the rollers and hairpins, Violet began to confide in ‘Flan’ about her life, her incredible pride in her twins, the celebrities who visited her at their humble East End home - and her troubled relationship with her husband.

    In the coming years, Hanna would learn the painful truth: after being stripped of their business, forced from their Zuhause (home), and deported to endure six months of inhumane conditions in the Lodz Ghetto, her parents were gassed in a brutally efficient killing operation in a remote forested area near Chelmno, Poland, on May 3, 1942. Written over a four-year period beginning when Hanna was about seventy-five years old, A Garland for Ashes is both a gripping detective story recounting the heartbreaking process of discovering her family’s fate and a poignant account of her journey from vengeful hatred to forgiveness and release from bitterness.

     Readers Reviews: A powerful and detailed account and very chilling to the thought of human activity to other humans. Very gripping and hard to put down, a highly recommend book. A compelling read and an insight into mans inhumanity to man.it seems unbelievable today how one deranged lunatic in Berlin could cause such destruction and persuade people to act in such a barbaric fashion towards others. I found this to be a fascinating read. Recommended. From the Heart of a man. From the depths of Hell. A harrowing narration of the Worlds darkest hours. This book should be compulsory reading in Schools. We must never forget. Thank you for all of the amazing reviews and purchasing this eBook.

    To begin their reign of terror, the Nazis burned down Bendzin's beautiful synagogue with some 200 helpless Jews inside. Most Jewish families in Bendzin, and rest of Poland were completely wiped out by the Holocaust. The Szpringers were just an ordinary middle-class family, but through many incredible strokes of luck, or perhaps miracles, all seven of them survived. For an entire Jewish family in Poland to survive the Holocaust is amazing--likely unique. What is more remarkable is how they survived. This is their story.

    Riding rental bikes and carrying a bare minimum of supplies, Rob Cocuzzo and his sixty-fouryear-old father, Stephen, embark on a 425-mile ride from Florence to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village in the mountains outside of Rome from which the Cocuzzo family emigrated a hundred years earlier.Prompted by Rob's ailing grandfather, who regrets having never visited his home village, the two cyclists pledge to make the trip in the old man's honor. Despite an expired passport, getting lost, some near misses, and other misadventures, the father and son finally reach the quirky village of San Donato. For Italian Jews in the 1940s, the road to San Donato was one of exile, and many of the people in the village banded together to protect nearly a hundred Jews. While meeting his many new "cousins," Rob attempts to unlock this history and glean what role his family played at the time--resistors or collaborators? The Road to San Donato is a generational story that many Americans share and a travel adventure not to be missed.

     Based on a true story, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a profound, captivating, and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the clever and "righteous" mother and daughter who teamed up to save them. Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are unlikely heroines. They are simple people who mind their own business and don't stand out from the crowd. Until 1939, when crisis strikes. The Nazis have invaded Poland and they are starting to persecute the Jews. Providing shelter to a Jew has become a death sentence. And yet, Franciszka and Helena decide to do just that. In their tiny, two-bedroom home in Sokal, Poland, they cleverly hide a Jewish family of two brothers and their wives in their pigsty out back, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen floorboards, and a defecting German soldier in the attic--each group completely unbeknownst to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commanders standing guard right outside her yard. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a reminder that there are, in fact, no profiles of courage and each individual's character is a personal choice. This book was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who, with her daughter, saved the lives of fifteen Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Before the war, there were six thousand Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only thirty survived the war and half of those did so because of Franciszka.

    

    In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city.In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it. Always on the run, never certain whom she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safe-houses, living with foreign workers, staunch communists, and even committed Nazis. Only her quick-witted determination and the most hair-raising strokes of luck allowed her to survive.

    

     The American Indians, depending on their tribe, had many names for the Creature: Sasahevas, Sasquatch, Bukwas (wild man of the woods), See’atco (one who runs and hides). What would Native American Indians have to gain from falsifying the existence of a Beast? The last name seemed the most appropriate to me. The One who runs and hides.

    Her husband has left her, a schizophrenic alcoholic, to raise their youngest four children without his help. Her children watch through the living room window as the police come and arrest her for disturbing the peace, leaving them alone in the house. Thus begins the astonishing story of a family always living on the brink of disaster. The story unfolds, told through the eyes of Marie's children. Not only are they impoverished, but they are dealing with Marie's erratic and often bizarre behavior. Through it all shines Marie's sense of humor and her unconventional ways of dealing with her difficult situation. How they manage to not only survive, but to grow into well-adjusted adults is a true story that shows how the miracle of love can overcome all obstacles.

     By mid-1942 the Japanese forces were threatening to take the colonial capital of Port Moresby and therefore gain a base to launch their proposed invasion of Australia. The allied forces needed to blunt the Japanese thrust toward Australia and thus protect the transpacific line of communications, as well as to secure a favorable position to take the offensive to the Japanese. Yet this was easier planned than executed; the Australians had been battered through two years of combat with their enemies and although the Americans were bringing large numbers of reinforcements, they were living under intolerable conditions, plagued by disease, short of equipment, ill-prepared for jungle fighting, and pitted against a skilled and resolute foe. According to Australian military historian, John Laffin, the campaign "was arguably the most arduous fought by any Allied troops during World War II". Milner uncovers every aspect of the campaign in 1942 from its early planning stages through to the many conflicts with Japanese troops that culminated in the brutal Battle of Buna-Gona in early 1943. However, rather than simply giving an overview of these turbulent months Milner focuses particularly on the actions of the 32nd Infantry Division who were at the frontline of the offensive to give the reader a direct view of what life was like during the campaign. To develop a picture of this dramatic campaign Milner drew from not only the official records but also spoke to men who were there and saw it, including Robert L. Eichelberger, as well as drawing from many Australian sources and historians. “Samuel Milner’s Victory in Papua, the official U.S. Army history, provides a thorough narrative of the Papua New Guinea campaign and is an excellent starting point.” Major Matthew H. Fath, Intrepidity, Iron Will, and Intellect: General Robert L. Eichelberger and Military Genius “a solid and valued work.” James Jay Carafano, www.heritage.org “a thorough account of the actions of the 32nd Division in the Papuan campaign of 1942.” Henry L. Roberts, Foreign Affairs “In telling the story of a comparatively limited number of troops, the author has been able to present the combat experience of small units in sharper focus than has been possible in most of the other full-scale campaign volumes.” Maj. Gen. A. C. Smith, Chief of Military History Samuel Milner was a historian who held a graduate degree in history from the University of Alberta and had done further graduate work in political science at the University of Minnesota. He had served during the war as a historian with the Army Air Transport Command in Australia and New Guinea, and worked for the Army office of the chief of military history after the war. After this he worked as government historian for many years before passing away in 2000. His book Victory in Papua was first published in 1957.

    In World War II it spent more consecutive days in combat than almost any other outfit. Recruited mainly from the Carolinas and Georgia and Tennessee, they were one of the hardest-fighting units the U.S. ever fielded in Europe. What was it about these men that made them so indomitable? They were tough and resilient for a start, but this division had something else. They possessed intrinsic zeal to engage the enemy that often left their adversaries in awe. Their U.S. Army nickname was the “Old Hickory” Division. But after encountering them on the battlefield, the Germans themselves came to call them “Roosevelt’s SS.”This book is a combat chronicle of this illustrious division that takes the reader right to the heart of the fighting through the eyes of those who were actually there. It goes from the hedgerows of Normandy to the 30th’s gallant stand against panzers at Mortain, to the brutal slugs around Aachen and the Westwall, and then to the Battle of the Bulge. Each chapter is meticulously researched and assembled with accurate timelines and after-action reports. The last remaining veterans of the 30th Division and attached units who saw the action firsthand relate their remarkable experiences here for the first, and probably the last time. This is precisely what military historians mean when they write about “fighting spirit.” There have been only a few books written about the 30th Division and none contained direct interviews with the veterans. This work follows their story from Normandy to the final victory in Germany, packed with previously untold accounts from the survivors. These are the men whose incredible stories epitomize what it was to be a GI in one of the toughest divisions in WWII.

    Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.