Download or read book Shelter from the Holocaust written by Mark Edele and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume will interest scholars of eastern European history and Holocaust studies, as well as those with an interest in refugee and migration issues.
Download or read book Surviving the Holocaust and Stalin written by Vanessa Holburn and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2023-02-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The horrors of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and labor camps were just the beginning of the struggle to survive for the Seiler family. As Hungarian Jews, they faced persecution of the very worst kind both from their own government and Nazi Germany. After liberation by the Soviets at the end of WWII they endured further punishment from the Stalinist regime concealed behind the Iron Curtain. This memoir is drawn from a recently re-discovered cache of precious family letters and exclusive interviews with Marta Seiler, who translated those letters for the first time. Marta has supplemented the account with childhood memories and original photos. The narrative is told through the voices of Marta, her mother Izabella and her father Lajos on a journey that takes us from 1935 to the present day. The reader is able to piece together the family’s personal challenges set against the backdrop of international political conflict. Exploring themes of resilience, identity and inherited trauma, by the end of the book we learn how Marta rediscovered her forbidden Jewish identity, found her place within the community and has moved toward a place of tolerance. In the tradition of oral history, Marta told her remarkable family story exclusively to journalist Vanessa Holburn. For Marta it’s important we learn the lessons of the past before they are lost for good.
Download or read book Surviving Hitler Evading Stalin written by Mildred Schindler Janzen and published by Scriptoria Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A teenage girl's peaceful farm life is upended when Stalin's Red Army captures her and her family. This memoir is a poignant account of love and loss, a beautiful tapestry woven by God's hand in the life of a WWII survivor.
Download or read book Surviving Hitler Evading Stalin written by Mildred Schindler Janzen and published by Oxford Southern. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A teenage girl's peaceful farm life is upended when Stalin's Red Army captures her and her family in Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin. Chronicling the harrowing events of a family torn apart by the injustices of war, this memoir is a poignant account of love and loss, a beautiful tapestry woven by God's hand in the life of a WWII survivor.
Download or read book Survival on the Margins written by Eliyana R. Adler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.
Download or read book The Victims Return written by Stephen F. Cohen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them. This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.
Download or read book Ester and Ruzya written by Masha Gessen and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “extraordinary family memoir,”* the National Book Award–winning author of The Future Is History reveals the story of her two grandmothers, who defied Fascism and Communism during a time when tyranny reigned. *The New York Times Book Review In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival. Ester Goldberg was a rebel from Bialystok, Poland, where virtually the entire Jewish community would be sent to Hitler’s concentration camps. Ruzya Solodovnik was a Russian-born intellectual who would become a high-level censor under Stalin’s regime. At war’s end, both women found themselves in Moscow. Over the years each woman had to find her way in a country that aimed to make every citizen a cog in the wheel of murder and repression. One became a hero in her children’s and grandchildren’s eyes; the other became a collaborator. With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Masha Gessen, one of the most trenchant observers of Russia and its history today, peels back the layers of time to reveal her grandmothers’ lives—and to show that neither story is quite what it seems. Praise for Masha Gessen “One of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker “Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
Download or read book The Seven a Family Holocaust Story written by Ellen Friedman and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive—the largest population of Jews who endured—for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven—a name given to them by their fellow refugees—were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Storybrings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors’ accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author’s reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory—one that is sure to resonate with today’s exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.
Download or read book Bloodlands written by Timothy Snyder and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
Download or read book The Gulag Survivor written by Nanci Adler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day.The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present.Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were ""liberated"" into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.
Download or read book The Seven a Family Holocaust Story written by Ellen Friedman and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive—the largest population of Jews who endured—for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven—a name given to them by their fellow refugees—were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Storybrings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors’ accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author’s reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory—one that is sure to resonate with today’s exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective.
Download or read book Two Regimes written by Teodora Verbitskya and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a verbatim memoir of Teodora Verbitskaya. Very little is known about Teodora, a gentile Ukrainian woman who bravely chronicled the years before, during and after World War II, in Soviet Ukraine. The Two Regimes Memoir specifically includes deportation to German forced labor camps. Through it all, Teodora was a woman who strived to feed and protect her children under very severe conditions, and she did so with sheer survival mode determination, integrity, prayer, and perseverance. These are Teodora’s thoughts concerning her children and what they lived through. Teodora and her daughters, Nadia, and Lucy were survivors and witnesses to the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Teodora wrote her memoir to document that these events took place, and, most importantly, to validate that the people she knew and lost would never be forgotten. Teodora’s daughter, Nadia Werbitzky, was haunted her entire life by what she had experienced. As a professional artist, Nadia used a paintbrush to express her thoughts. Nadia understood the importance of her mother’s manuscript, memories shared by both mother and daughter. Nadia painted feverishly in the last years of her life so that her story would not perish with her.
Download or read book Two Roads Home written by Daniel Finkelstein and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hair-raising... includes not just Hitler’s depredations but Stalin’s too—a double measure of evil."—The Wall Street Journal An epic and uplifting World War II family history of resistance that spans Europe, telling of two happy families uprooted by war, their incredible suffering under Hitler and Stalin, and the near-miraculous survival stories of the author's mother and father. "Moving and important."—Robert Harris, author of Act of Oblivion In Two Roads Home beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters. Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father, Dolu was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Dolu, was deported to Siberia and Ludwik and his mother were sentenced to forced labor in Kazakhstan, starved and housed in a stable in freezing conditions. Two Roads Home is a page-turning account of the narrow escapes, forged passports, ingenuity, bravery, and luck that allowed Mirjam and Ludwik to survive the war and find each other. Using their personal testimony, letters sent to Siberia, a diary written in Belsen, and years of historical research, Daniel Finkelstein tells what happened to two families, one the victim of the Nazis, the other of the Soviets. A tale of deliverance and triumph over evil, Two Roads Home will profoundly touch all who read it.
Download or read book Through Blood and Tears written by Henry Skorr and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Henry Skorr has told his story, in a series of interviews conducted by Ivan Sokolov, in an effort to preserve the memory of those he loved, and a world that no longer exists. Henry takes the reader from his childhood in Kalisz, Poland, through the horrors of the Nazi occupation, the insanity and brutality of the Soviet system, the corruption of the newly re-formed Poland, and finally to the shores of Israel. The main part of the story deals with his time in the Soviet Union, providing the reader with a rare insight into the plight of Polish-Jewish refugees, as well as native Russians, during the war years. The memoir adds an important voice to the catalogue of survivors' tales; with courage and honesty, Henry Skorr articulately presents us with the Soviet experience, giving voice to the thousands who fled east and the millions he found there."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Guarded by Angels written by Alan Elsner and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates the story of Elsner's father, Eugene, born in Odessa in 1918, and his uncle, Mark, born in Nowy Sącz in 1923. They grew up in Nowy Sącz and fled to Soviet-occupied Lvov when the Germans invaded. They and their cousin, Henek, were sent to a gulag in the north and then evacuated to Soviet Central Asia. When Stalin made a pact with the Polish government-in-exile and Polish prisoners in the USSR were amnestied, the brothers were about to joined Anders' army, but encountered antisemitism among the recruits. They found temporary refuge in Nezlobnaya in the Caucasus until the Germans arrived. After adopting the Slavic family name Olesiuk, Gene became a translator for the Germans but also helped the resistance. The brothers then joined another "Polish" army, the Soviet Kosciusko Division. While fighting against German forces, the brothers were temporarily separated, then reunited 30 miles from the German border. Gene had been severely wounded and presumed dead. He encountered Polish antisemitism again, among POWs, just before the end of the war. Their younger brother had been killed in the Nowy Sącz ghetto and their parents in Bełżec. The author visited this site with his father and, disturbed at the lack of a monument there, worked to remedy the situation.
Download or read book Man Is Wolf to Man written by Janusz Bardach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-09-21 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in hardcover in 1998.
Download or read book Shush Growing Up Jewish under Stalin written by Emil Draitser and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word "Jewish"—even in casual conversation—he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural by-product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when "Shush!" was the most frequent word he heard: "Don't use your Jewish name in public. Don't speak a word of Yiddish. And don't cry over your murdered relatives." This compelling memoir conveys the reader back to Draitser's childhood and provides a unique account of midtwentieth-century life in Russia as the young Draitser struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Lively, evocative, and rich with humor, this unforgettable story ends with the death of Stalin and, through life stories of the author's ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia.
