Download or read book Surviving the Nazi Occupation of Luxembourg written by Marguerite Thill-Somin-Nicholson and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-06 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early on the morning of May 10, 1940, twelve-year-old Marguerite Thill was awakened by the cries of her father warning the family that the Nazis were about to invade their country of Luxembourg. By that evening, Marguerite Gretchen, as she was called her three sisters, and their parents had donned several layers of clothing and left on foot, along with hundreds of others, to escape into France. This marked the beginning of an amazing odyssey. For the next three months, the family lived as refugees, trying, sometimes without success, to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. They slept in filthy barns, acquired lice, went without food and water, and huddled in ditches while bombs fell around them. Once the French government was able to establish some organization, Gretchen and her family were transported to Montbard, where they were placed into the home of two elderly ladies who had a spare room. Just as they had begun to feel safe and relaxed, they were moved to the tiny village of Cruchy, where they were placed into a house that had not been inhabited since WWI. When a troop of German soldiers took partial possession of the house, Gretchen's father quickly developed the habit of sleeping with an axe at his side, the only method at his disposal to protect his wife and four daughters from the German commander sleeping in the next room and the soldiers in their tents pitched in the orchard just outside. Throughout their enforced travels, Gretchen and her family beheld gruesome images of corpses, blood-drenched streets, wounded war horses, a mother killed with her baby's carriage still at her side. When the family was able to return to Luxembourg, it was to a homeland which would remain occupied by the Nazis for the next four years. Swastikas draped every building. German troops goose-stepped down the streets. Speakers broadcast Hitler's speeches day and night. Nazis stood at the back of the church, once a place of great comfort, to ensure the priest said nothing against them. Along with the rest of the nation, Gretchen and her family had their fuel and food severely rationed. Allowed little more than was needed to survive, they were often hungry. And as was not unusual in that time and place, Gretchen had adult expectations placed upon her: holding a baby pig while a farmer slaughtered it so the family could have some meat; standing in line all night at the local butcher for a pound of horse meat; acting as her family's look-out while her parents listened to anti-Nazi BBC; sneaking food to Luxembourg boys who had gone underground. Growing into young womanhood, she weathered every hardship with the quiet courage that would come to mark her generation. Four years and four months after her nation's flight into France, the Allies liberated Luxembourg. The Thill household became a favorite visiting spot for the American G.I.s as word had spread that Madame Thill spoke English. The soldiers brought gallon cans of food, and Gretchen was introduced to peanut butter. At the age of seventeen, she began working at American Headquarters in Luxembourg City, where she met an American soldier whom she soon married. She then joined the thousands of other war brides who sailed for America. She and her new husband settled in his hometown of Duluth, where they started living a life of selfless hard work so their children could grow up to enjoy lives that would not include fear or hunger. Gretchen would never again feel the ground shake with cannon fire, but her memories of a life interrupted by history would remain with her in the form of that quiet courage which has always allowed her to stare down tragedy.
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: Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research 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 Defiant Diplomat George Platt Waller written by George Platt Waller and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American diplomat George Platt Waller's memoir of his experiences in Luxembourg from 1939-1941 reveals the plight of a small neutral country invaded by Nazi Germany. His vivid account of the response of Luxembourgers to war and occupation and his own efforts to help refugees offers a compelling story of witness and resistance to evil in the Second World War.
Download or read book The Routledge History of the Second World War written by Paul R. Bartrop and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of the Second World War sums up the latest trends in the scholarship of that conflict, covering a range of major themes and issues. The book delivers a thematic analysis of the many ways in which study of the Second World War can take place, considering international, transnational, and global approaches, and serves as a major jumping off point for further research into the specific fields covered by each of the expert authors. It demonstrates the global and total nature of the Second World War, giving due coverage to the conflict in all major theatres and through the lens of the key combatants and neutrals, examines issues of race, gender, ideology, and society during the war, and functions as a textbook to educate students as to the trends that have taken place in how the conflict has been (and can be) interpreted in the modern world. Divided into twelve parts that cover central themes of the conflict, including theatres of war, leadership, societies, occupation, secrecy and legacies, it enables those with no memory of war to approach it with a view to comprehending what it was all about and places the history of this conflict into a context that is international, transnational, and institutional. This is a comprehensive and accessible reference volume for anyone interested in the most up to date scholarship on this major conflict. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com
Download or read book Surviving the Nazi Occupation of Luxembourg written by Marguerite Thill-Somin-Nicholson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Savage Continent written by Keith Lowe and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
Download or read book Luxembourg written by Patricia Sheehan and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luxemburg is a small country with a big past. This book delves into the aspects that make the country today: such as its history, economy, government, food, and sports activities. Young readers will learn all about this country by reading this comprehensive, up-to-date book.
Download or read book Among Enemies a Young Woman s Fight for Survival in Nazi Germany written by Melanie Wilson and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-person narrative tells the true story of Marguerite Kirchner, whose multicultural family was living in Germany when WWII began. We have remained as true as possible to Marguerites account which reveals to readers the cruelty of war and the innocence of past generations. As a child, her family lived a luxurious life. Her mother was a French aristocrat, and her father a wealthy Austrian diplomat, and so her story begins. Always defiant, Margie was forced into a labor camp for dissident teenagers. She attended the University of Berlin during the Berlin bombings, became a young teacher in the Polish war zone, was captured as a prisoner of war and escaped, and after the war, worked for the Allied Forces, helping repatriate those who had been displaced. Her story demonstrates cunning and great courage. She went from affluence to poverty and survived the war on her wits alone, dependent on only herself and the skills shed acquired from traveling with her family. Only after the war does she reflect on what her single-minded struggle for survival cost her, and a new journey, of a very different kind, begins.
Download or read book The Passenger written by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FOR THE GUARDIAN * FINANCIAL TIMES * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE * THE TIMES Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train. And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. His travels bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly. Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.
Download or read book To Lose a Battle written by Alistair Horne and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-06-28 with total page 1243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940, the German army fought and won an extraordinary battle with France in six weeks of lightning warfare. With the subtlety and compulsion of a novel, Horne’s narrative shifts from minor battlefield incidents to high military and political decisions, stepping far beyond the confines of military history to form a major contribution to our understanding of the crises of the Franco-German rivalry. To Lose a Battle is the third part of the trilogy beginning with The Fall of Paris and continuing with The Price of Glory (already available in Penguin).
Download or read book Leap Into Darkness written by Leo Bretholz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1999-09-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A harrowing, action-packed account of the author's series of audacious escapes from the Nazis' Final Solution--"riveting...a fascinating and moving piece of history" (Library Journal). Young Leo Bretholz survived the Holocaust by escaping from the Nazis (and others) not once, but seven times during his almost seven-year ordeal crisscrossing war-torn Europe. He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid in attics, cellars, anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety. First he swam the River Sauer at the German-Belgian border. Later he climbed the Alps on feet so battered they froze to his socks--only to be turned back at the Swiss border. He crawled out from under the barbed wire of a French holding camp, and hid in a village in the Pyrenees while gendarmes searched it. And in the dark hours of one November morning, he escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz. Leap into Darkness is the sweeping memoir of one Jewish boy's survival, and of the family and the world he left behind.
Download or read book Dawn written by Elie Wiesel and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2006-03-21 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elie Wiesel's Dawn is an eloquent meditation on the compromises, justifications, and sacrifices that human beings make when they murder other human beings. "The author . . . has built knowledge into artistic fiction." —The New York Times Book Review Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night-long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel's ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour-by-hour narrative. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he waits for the appointed hour and his act of assassination. The basis for the 2014 film of the same name, now available on streaming and home video.
Download or read book Angel of the Mountains written by Paul Maunder and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2024-06-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Maunder's book is more than just a biography of the rise and fall of a complicated man . . . It is also a critique of the damage that myth-making and the media can do to an athlete; a study of what happens to a demigod when thrown from Mount Olympus' The Times Charly Gaul is a forgotten cycling legend. Once a household name across Europe, the diminutive Luxembourger won the 1958 Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia twice. A unique rider, Gaul was supremely gifted at climbing and resilient even in the foulest weather. His pedalling style was smooth and swift, and he could set an unmatchable metronome rhythm on a mountain climb. 'Mozart on two wheels,' was how one contemporary writer described him; another dubbed him 'The Angel of the Mountains'. At the end of his cycling career Gaul disappeared, becoming a hermit living in a forest in Luxembourg. What drove Charly Gaul into a recluse's life? In Angel of the Mountains, Paul Maunder seeks to uncover the truth about Gaul, his psychology and the circumstances of his withdrawal from society. In rediscovering Gaul's enigmatic life, we find not only an unlikely hero but also a larger truth about the nature of sporting success.
Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book Nazis after Hitler written by Donald M McKale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories of thirty war criminals who escaped accountability, from a historian praised for his “well written, scrupulously researched” work (The New York Times). This deeply researched book traces the biographies of thirty “typical” perpetrators of the Holocaust—some well-known, some obscure—who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the perpetrators were rarely, if ever, tried or punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany’s extermination of nearly six million European Jews. He highlights the bitter contrasts between the comfortable postwar lives of many war criminals and the enduring suffering of their victims, and how, in the face of exhaustive evidence showing their culpability, nearly all claimed ignorance of what was going on—and insisted they had done nothing wrong. “McKale ends the book with a haunting question: whether life would be different today if the Allies had pursued Holocaust criminals more aggressively after WWII. History buffs and students of the Holocaust will be fascinated.” ―Publishers Weekly “Gripping and important reading.” —Eric A. Johnson, author of What We Knew
Download or read book The Length of a String written by Elissa Brent Weissman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imani is adopted, and she's ready to search for her birth parents. But when she discovers the diary her Jewish great-grandmother wrote chronicling her escape from Holocaust-era Europe, Imani begins to see family in a new way. Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
Download or read book Surviving Hitler written by Andrea Warren and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life-changing story of a young boy’s struggle for survival in a Nazi-run concentration camp, narrated in the voice of Holocaust survivor Jack Mandelbaum. When twelve-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is separated from his family and shipped off to the Blechhammer concentration camp, his life becomes a never-ending nightmare. With minimal food to eat and harsh living conditions threatening his health, Jack manages to survive by thinking of his family. In this Robert F. Silbert Honor book, readers will glimpse the dark reality of life during the Holocaust, and how one boy made it out alive. William Allen White Award Winner Robert F. Silbert Honor ALA Notable Children’s Book VOYA Nonfiction Honor Book
