Download or read book Kasztner s Train written by Anna Porter and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In summer 1944, Rezso Kasztner met with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex, and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agreed to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. In other manoeuvrings, Kasztner may have saved another 40,000 Jews already in the camps. For his troubles, Kasztner was later judged, falsely, as having 'sold his soul to the devil'. Prior to being exonerated, he was murdered in Israel in 1957. Part political thriller, part love story, and part legal drama, Porter's account explores the nature of Kasztner - the hero, the cool politician, the proud Zionist, the romantic lover, the man who believed that promises, even to die-hard Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.

Download or read book Kasztner s Train written by Anna Porter and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true, heart-wrenching story of Rezsö Kasztner, a Hungarian lawyer and journalist, who rescued thousands of Jews during the last days of the Second World War - and the ultimate price he paid. Summer 1944 - Rezsö Kasztner meets with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agree to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. The wealthy Jews of Budapest will pay an average of $1,500 for each family member to be included; the poor will pay nothing. In addition to those on the train, Kasztner negotiates with Eichmann to keep 20,000 Hungarian Jews alive - Eichmann called them 'Kasztner's Jews' or the 'Jews on ice' - for a deposit of approximately $100 per head. These deals would haunt Kasztner to the end of his life. After the war, Kasztner was vilified in an infamous Israeli libel trial for having 'sold his soul to the devil' in collaborating with the Nazis. In 1957, he was murdered while he awaited the Supreme Court verdict that eventually vindicated him. Kasztner's Train explores the nature of Kasztner: the cool hero, the proud Zionist, the man who believed that promises, even to the Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.

Download or read book Kasztner s Train written by Anna Porter and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true, heart-wrenching tale of Hungary's own Oskar Schindler, a lawyer and journalist named Rezso Kasztner who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during the last chaotic days of World War II -- and the ultimate price he paid. In summer 1944, Rezso Kasztner met with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agreed to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. In other manoeuvrings, Kastzner may have saved another 40,000 Jews already in the camps. Kasztner was later judged for having "sold his soul to the devil." Prior to being exonerated, he was murdered in Israel in 1957. Part political thriller, part love story and part legal drama, Porter's account explores the nature of Kasztner -- the hero, the cool politician, the proud Zionist, the romantic lover, the man who believed that promises, even to diehard Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.

Download or read book Kasztner s Crime written by Paul Bogdanor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost?After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided.Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people.

Download or read book Rezso Kasztner written by Ladislaus Löb and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two months after his eleventh birthday, on 9 July 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Löb. Five months later, with the Second World War still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Rezso Kasztner - himself a Hungarian Jew - with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in his adopted home of Israel. To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. He was accused of betraying the bulk of the Hungarian Jewry by hand-picking only those who were politically and personally dear to him, or those from whom he could benefit financially, and the judge of his post-war trial concluded that he had 'sold his soul to Satan'. Rezso Kasztner tells his story - and also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to him. A compelling combination of history and memoir, it is also an examination of one individual's unique achievement and a consideration of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.

Download or read book Kasztner s Train written by Anna Porter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heroic story of the "Hungarian Oscar Schindler" who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, only to be accused of collaboration and assassinated in Israel twelve years after WWII ended. Oscar Schindler's and Raoul Wallenberg's efforts to save people from Nazi extinction are legendary; Rezso Kasztner, by contrast, is practically unknown, even though he may have been the greatest rescuer of Jews during World War II. He was also the most controversial, and that, along with the relative lack of focus on events in Hungary toward the end of the war, has no doubt led to his anonymity. Now, with the publication of Anna Porter's remarkable chronicle, Kasztner's achievements are in full view. Based on interviews with those who were on the train and with family members of those denied a place on it, as well as documents and correspondence not previously published, Anna Porter tells the dramatic full story of one of the heroes of the twentieth century.

Download or read book The Collaborator written by Diane Armstrong and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling story of heroism, passion, and betrayal based on astonishing true events set in the darkest days of World War II in Budapest. For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Alice Network and My Name is Eva. Budapest, 1944: The Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences... Sydney, 2005: Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past and present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption. From USA Today bestselling author Diane Armstrong come a story of an act of heroism, the taint of collaboration, a doomed love affair, and an Australian woman who travels across the world to discover the truth...

Download or read book The Kasztner Report written by Ṿaʻadat ha-ʻezrah ṿeha-hatsalah be-Budapeshṭ and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Report of the Budapest Jewish Rescue Committee, 1942-1945.

Download or read book My Mother s Secret written by J.L. Witterick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who save them all. Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people...until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic—each party completely unknown to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives—all under one roof—My Mother’s Secret is a testament to the kindness, courage, and generosity of ordinary people who chose to be extraordinary.

Download or read book The Escape Artist written by Jonathan Freedland and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller "A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information—and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" — Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . . Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the astonishing true story of Rudolf Vrba, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world of a truth too few were willing to hear. In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom—among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen—a forensically detailed report that eventually reached Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba had risked everything to deliver. Though Vrba helped save two hundred thousand Jewish lives, he never stopped believing it could have been so many more. This is the story of a brilliant yet troubled man—a gifted “escape artist” who, even as a teenager, understood that the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death. Rudolf Vrba deserves to take his place alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, and Primo Levi as one of the handful of individuals whose stories define our understanding of the Holocaust.

Download or read book Perfidy Illustrated Edition written by Ben Hecht and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the Kastner affair: a conspiracy, a violation of conscience, criminal betrayal. Picture those early days when the new nation of Israel was being formed in the region of Palestine European Jews had just endured history’s ultimate holocaust. Allied governments such as Great Britain had refused to take action to block the trains from carrying thousands of them to certain death. In those final days before the end of the war, the epicenter of the Nazi extermination effort was Hungary. Jews had fled there from Germany and Poland, but they could not outrun the shadow of death. That is the obvious truth, but was there more? Was there collaboration with the enemy that resulted in these murderous acts? Can you really trust governments and leaders to do what is right and best for those they represent? As Edmund Burke declared, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But what happens when those who are trusted as good join forces with evil? Underlying this story is a bizarre tapestry of deception at the highest levels of government with the lives of many innocents in the balance. The libel trial of Rudolf Kastner, a prominent journalist representing the new government and supported by its Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, establishes the outline of that hidden past, protected by the political interests of some of Israel’s early leaders. A true classic...History that reads like a mystery novel when villains parade themselves as heroes and the real heroes are targets of evil.-Print ed. Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust

Download or read book Buying a Better World written by Anna Porter and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2015-02-21 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incredible, inside story of the man and the organization changing the way we change the world. George Soros is well known as the legendary speculator who made a fortune betting against the British pound in 1992, but he is also a philanthropist who has spent billions in order to promote democracy around the world. Morton Abramowitz of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace once said that Soros was “the only private citizen with his own foreign policy.” Anna Porter has interviewed Soros, his senior staff, journalists, politicians, and many others in an attempt to understand the man. Each person has a unique story to tell. Focusing on the last decade, she explores how Soros’s Open Society Foundations have spread his ideas of human rights, democracy, Western liberalism, and participatory capitalism around the globe. These are the ideas Soros has said he considers worth dying for. How have they translated into reality? What will his legacy be?

Download or read book Kasztner s Crime written by Paul Bogdanor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost?After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided.Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people.

Download or read book The Ghosts of Europe written by Anna Porter and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, Adam Michnik said that Central Europe came “as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here, in Central Europe, that the last two wars began.” Nearing the twentieth anniversary of Communism’s collapse, acclaimed author Anna Porter traveled to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary to discover whether and how democracy has taken root in these former Iron Curtain countries. The former borderlands of the long-defunct Hapsburg Empire and the more recently dispersed Soviet Empire have attempted to invent their own forms of democracy and capitalism. However, disturbing signs of old attitudes have returned, bringing into question Central Europe’s ability to reform its elites and to effectively control public demonstrations of hatred, the rise of racial tensions, and the emergence of fascist parties. Porter interviewed the young and the old, the winners and the losers, in this grand European transformation. Porter walks Wenceslas Square with those who suffered the violence of the state police and helped to organize the ’89 revolution. She meets with revolutionary leaders such as Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, as well as custodians of the new regimes, among them Radek Sikorski, Michael Kocáb, and Ferenc Gyurcsány. She takes us to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and Budapest’s House of Terror Museum—fascinating if controversial attempts to reckon with dark periods of history. She interviews the wealthiest man in Hungary, the general who ordered martial law in Poland, attends an ultraright rally, and visits a Gypsy village where a newly burgeoning yet all-too-familiar racism has destroyed a family. Gradually, a portrait emerges of a Europe struggling under the weight of history and memory, its peoples divided over half-forgotten events, old ethnic rivalries, borders drawn and redrawn—ghosts that had lurked, unacknowledged, under Communism’s force-fed stories of peaceful coexistence and a common front toward the Western enemy. Now, Central European rhetoric veers between historical reckoning, revisionism, and the politics of retribution. Penetrating, fascinating, and powerfully observed, The Ghosts of Europe illuminates themes of tyranny, nationalism, racism, and denial in nations with a tumultuous history and a future very much in the balance.

Download or read book I Kiss Your Hands Many Times written by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent wartime love story about the forces that brought the author’s parents together and those that nearly drove them apart Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s parents, Hanna and Aladár, met and fell in love in Budapest in 1940. He was a rising star in the foreign ministry—a vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories, were patrons of intellectuals and artists, and entertained dignitaries at their baronial estates. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding. In a secret and controversial deal brokered with Heinrich Himmler, the family turned over their vast holdings in exchange for their safe passage to Portugal. Aladár survived Dachau, a fragile and anxious version of himself. After nearly two years without contact, he located Hanna and wrote her a letter that warned that he was not the man she’d last seen, but he was still in love with her. After months of waiting for visas and transit, she finally arrived in a devastated Budapest in December 1945, where at last they were wed. Framed by a cache of letters written between 1940 and 1947, Szegedy-Maszák’s family memoir tells the story, at once intimate and epic, of the complicated relationship Hungary had with its Jewish population—the moments of glorious humanism that stood apart from its history of anti-Semitism—and with the rest of the world. She resurrects in riveting detail a lost world of splendor and carefully limns the moral struggles that history exacted—from a country and its individuals. Praise for I Kiss Your Hands Many Times “I Kiss Your Hand Many Times is the sweeping story of Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family in pre– and post–World War II Europe, capturing the many ways the struggles of that period shaped her family for years to come. But most of all it is a beautiful love story, charting her parents’ devotion in one of history’s darkest hours.”—Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief, the Huffington Post Media Group “In this panoramic and gripping narrative of a vanished world of great wealth and power, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák restores an important missing chapter of European, Hungarian, and Holocaust history.”—Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America “How many times can a heart be broken? Hungarians know, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s family more than most. History has broken theirs again and again. This is the story of that violence, told by the daughter of an extraordinary man and extraordinary woman who refused to surrender to it. Every perfectly chosen word is as it happened. So brace yourself. Truth can break hearts, too.”—Robert Sam Anson, author of War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina “This family memoir is everything you could wish for in the genre: the story of a fascinating family that illuminates the historical time it lived through. . . . Informative and fascinating in every way, [I Kiss Your Hands Many Times] is a great introduction to World War II Hungary and a moving tale of personal relationships in a time of great duress.”—Booklist (starred review)

Download or read book The Forgiveness Tour written by Susan Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Apologies Can Help You Move Forward With Your Life “To err is human; to forgive divine.” But what if the person who hurt you most refuses to apologize or express any regret? That’s the question haunting Manhattan journalist Susan Shapiro when her trusted advisor of fifteen years repeatedly lies to her. Stunned by the betrayal, she can barely eat or sleep. She’s always seen herself as big-hearted and benevolent, someone who will forgive anyone anything - as long as they’re remorseful. Yet the addiction specialist who helped her quit smoking, drinking and drugs after decades of self-destruction won’t explain – or stop - his ongoing deceit, leaving her blindsided. Her crisis management strategy is becoming her crisis. To protect her sanity and sobriety, Shapiro ends their relationship and vows they’ll never speak again. Yet ghosting him doesn’t end her distress. She has screaming arguments with him in her mind, relives their fallout in panicked nightmares and even lights a candle, chanting a secret Yiddish curse to exact revenge. In her entrancing, heartfelt new memoir The Forgiveness Tour: How to Find the Perfect Apology, Shapiro wrestles with how to exonerate someone who can’t cough up a measly “my bad” or mumble “mea culpa.” Seeking wisdom, she explores the billion-dollar Forgiveness Industry touting the personal benefits of absolution, where the only choice on every channel is: radical forgiveness. She fears it’s all bullshit. Desperate for enlightenment, she surveys her old rabbis, as well as religious leaders from every denomination. Unable to reconcile all the confusing abstractions, she embarks on a cross country journey where she interviews people who suffered unforgivable wrongs that were never atoned: victims of genocides, sexual assault, infidelity, cruelty and racism. A Holocaust survivor in D.C. admits he’s thrived from spite. A Michigan man meets with the drunk driver who killed his wife and children. A daughter in Seattle grapples with her mother - who stayed married to the father who raped her. Knowing their estrangement isn’t her fault, a Florida mom spends eight years apologizing to her son anyway -with surprising results. Does love mean forever having to say you’re sorry? Critics praised Shapiro’s previous memoir Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex as fiercely honest, fascinating, funny and “a mind-bendingly good read.” Now the bestselling author and popular writing professor returns with a darker, wiser follow up, addressing the universal enigma of blind forgiving. Shapiro’s brilliant new gurus sooth her broken psyche and answer her burning mystery: How can you forgive someone without an apology? Does she? Should you?

Download or read book Eichmann in Jerusalem written by Hannah Arendt and published by Topeka Bindery. This book was released on 1963 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendts authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendts postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.