Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

    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.

    Though German Jews, they are embraced by their Italian neighbors, and for the next several years, the pensione flourishes and becomes their perch to observe the world’s events. Travelers from across Europe and America come to their door, each with their own story, mystery, or surprise. Nearly all have been touched in some way by the ominous changes occurring to the north, in Nazi-controlled Germany.When war breaks out in Europe and Italy sides with Germany, Elsa and her family’s fears are quickly realized. The growing sense that the atrocities in German-occupied lands will soon occur in Italy forces them to sell their pensione and attempt a desperate journey to safety in America. The way seems impossible. Day by day, war makes travel increasingly difficult as countries begin closing their doors to refugees.Told in Elsa’s words and written by her grandson, One More Moon is the extraordinary story of a woman and her family’s often harrowing experiences in the years before and during World War II.

    By the time she was twelve, the war had begun. Abandoned by her father when he realized the price of being associated with a Jewish wife and family, Anita and her mother were ultimately left to fend for themselves. Anita's teenage years are spent desperately fighting for survival yet learning to trust in the One she discovered would not leave her ...

    Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to pass in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is uniquecelebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.

    The story of these men is unrecognized, submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps.From all countries and of all ages, the priests were gathered behind the barbed wire of Dachau according to an agreement wrested from the Reich by Vatican diplomacy. For eight years, both tragedies and magnificent gestures punctuated the journey of the clergy at Dachau, from the terrifying forced march of -Holy Week- in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of priests in the barracks of those dying of typhoid, to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Never in the course of history have so many priests, monks and seminarians been murdered in such a small area: 1,034 lost their lives.Beyond the personal journeys of which it is composed, the history of the priests at Dachau sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps, on the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism and, beyond the strictly historical perspective, on faith and spiritual commitment. This book deals with many questions about the priest barracks, including:How does the experience of the priests at Dachau compare to those who were laymen? What were their privileges and what were their particular sufferings? Did the Nazi persecution against the clergy have ideological or political underpinnings? Did the faith and religious commitment of the priests reinforce them against the methodical dehumanization in the camps? Were their moral convictions, forged by the Gospel and the tradition of the Church, able to resist the perversion of values imposed by the SS? Did the sufferings endured by the priests at Dachau bear fruit within the ecclesiastical institution and also outside, at the peripheries of the Church?In Guillaume Zeller's recounting of this strange story, this fragment of the tragedy of the concentration camps allows us to learn answers to these and other intriguing questions.

    

    In the 1950s, Noah's grandparents raised their children on Holocaust stories. But because tales of rebellion and death camps gave his father and aunt constant nightmares, in Noah's adolescence Grandma would only recount the PG version. Noah, however, craved the uncensored truth and always felt one right question away from their pasts. But when Poppy died at the end of the millennium, it seemed the Holocaust stories died with him. In the years that followed, without the love of her life by her side, Grandma could do little more than mourn. After college, Noah, a travel writer, roamed the world for fifteen months with just one rule: avoid Poland. A few missteps in Europe, however, landed him in his grandparents' country. When he returned home, he cautiously told Grandma about his time in Warsaw, fearing that the past would bring up memories too painful for her to relive. But, instead, remembering the Holocaust unexpectedly rejuvenated her, ending five years of mourning her husband. Together, they explored the memories--of Auschwitz and a half-dozen other camps, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the displaced persons camps--that his grandmother had buried for decades. And the woman he had playfully mocked as a child became his hero. I was left with the stories--the ones that had been hidden, the ones that offered catharsis, the ones that gave me a second hero, the ones that resurrected a family, the ones that survived even death. Their shared journey profoundly illuminates the transformative power of never forgetting.

    His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. “You must have a future,” his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye.As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid—he lived in constant fear that he and his family would be found and killed. However, even in Hitler-ruled Nazi Germany, there were plenty of people who refused to cower to absolute evil and who did everything they could to usher families like Stoessinger’s to freedom.In From Holocaust to Harvard, Stoessinger recalls heartbreaking moments from his childhood and of living a life of secrets in Shanghai. He then presents the second part of his story—the part where he attempts to untangle himself from his previous life and devastating memories and is able to relocate to America, earn a graduate-level degree from a prestigious university, and later become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations despite making a decision that nearly lands him in prison and threatens his hard-earned freedom.Throughout his story, Stoessinger expresses his gratitude to those who helped him through the toughest parts of this life and put him on a path that led him to a Harvard education, a successful career, and inner peace.

    Régine Miller was one such child, who left her mother, father, and brother when she was 10 years old. Utterly alone as she is shunted from place to place, told to tell no one she is Jewish, she hears that her mother and brother have been taken by the SS, the German secret police. Only her desperate hope that her father will return sustains her. At war’s end she must learn to live with the terrible truth of “the final solution,” the Nazi’s extermination camps.The people who sheltered Régine cover a wide spectrum of human types, ranging from callous to kind, fearful to defiant, exploitive to caring. This is a story of a brave girl and an equally brave woman to tell the story so many years later.From the Hardcover edition.

    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.

    From there, they traveled across the Pacific to Japan, and then on to occupied France, landing in that country on the very day that Germany declared war on the United States. Their epic adventure had suddenly taken a dark turn. Wolfgang Wergin and Herbie Haupt were American citizens, though German by birth. Both had lived in America since the age of five, yet now they were given a choice by German officials. They could join a Nazi sabotage mission heading back to the United States to blow up aluminum factories, or they could be drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front. One of these young men chose the first option, and one the second. Only one of them would survive. While this fragment of history is mostly forgotten today, the episode became one of the most sensational news stories of its time, garnering intense national interest. "Enemies: A War Story" is a fictionalized version of this true story, sticking as close to the facts as possible. This is a novel that raises challenging questions about the meanings of patriotism, justice, and American morality during difficult times.

    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.

    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.

    Ruth Elias, a young Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia, survived three years in the Nazi camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. In this haunting testimony, she relives the day-to-day conditions and horrific inhumane treatment of those years. She describes in painful detail how, having given birth in Auschwitz, she and her baby became part of a sadistic experiment personally conducted by the infamous SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele. Triumph of Hope also vividly recounts the aftermath of imprisonment, the difficult adjustment to normal life after the war. Ruth Elias's story is a portrayal of the emotional and psychological state of life in chaotic postwar Europe: from the desperate, futile attempts to track down family and friends; to the unabated hostility of former neighbors; to the chilling indifference of those who knew nothing of the experience of the camps. For Ruth, hope would have to take the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited.