Download or read book Tehran Children written by Mikhal Dekel and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author Mikhal Dekel’s father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as “special settlements.” Then came a journey during which tens of thousands died of starvation and disease en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While American organizations negotiated to deliver aid to the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who remained there, Dekel’s father and aunt were two of nearly one thousand refugee children who were evacuated to Iran, where they were embraced by an ancient Persian-Jewish community. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their thirteen-thousand-mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees (including over one hundred thousand Polish Catholics). The arrival of the “Tehran Children” was far from straightforward, as religious and secular parties vied over their futures in what would soon be Israel. Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel fuses memoir with extensive archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, a Russian oligarch, and an Uzbek descendent of Korean deportees. The history she uncovers is one of the worst and the best of humanity. The experiences her father and aunt endured, along with so many others, ultimately reshaped and redefined their lives and identities and those of other refugees and rescuers, profoundly and permanently, during and after the war. With literary grace, Tehran Children presents a unique narrative of the Holocaust, whose focus is not the concentration camp, but the refugee, and whose center is not Europe, but Central Asia and the Middle East.
Download or read book Lives Reclaimed written by Mark Roseman and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated historian of Nazi Germany, the story of a remarkable but completely unsung group that risked everything to help the most vulnerable In the early 1920s amidst the upheaval of Weimar Germany, a small group of peaceable idealists began to meet, practicing a quiet, communal life focused on self-improvement. For the most part, they had come to know each other while attending adult education classes in the city of Essen. But “the Bund,” as they called their group, had lofty aspirations—under the direction of their leader Artur Jacobs, its members hoped to forge an ideal community that would serve as a model for society at large. But with the ascent of the Nazis, the Bund was forced to reevaluate its mission, focusing instead on offering assistance to the persecuted, despite the great risk. Their activities ranged from visiting devastated Jewish families after Kristallnacht, to sending illicit letters and parcels of food and clothes to deportees in concentration camps, to sheltering political dissidents and Jews on the run. What became of this group? And how should its deeds—often small, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness and assistance—be evaluated in the broader history of life under the Nazis? Drawing on a striking set of previously unpublished letters, diaries, Gestapo reports, other documents, and his own interviews with survivors, historian Mark Roseman shows how and why the Bund undertook its dangerous work. It is an extraordinary story in its own right, but Roseman takes us deeper, encouraging us to rethink the concepts of resistance and rescue under the Nazis, ideas too often hijacked by popular notions of individual heroism or political idealism. Above all, the Bund’s story is one that sheds new light on what it meant to offer a helping hand in this dark time.
Download or read book A Long Way Home written by Bob Golan and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2005 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Golan's book is an eyewitness account of some of the most important events of the 20th century. This is a fresh and engaging story of the experience of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union and Israel as seen through the eyes of a boy.
Download or read book A Train to Palestine written by Randy Grigsby and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1938, eight-year-old Josef Rosenbaum, his mother, and his younger sister set out from Germany on a cruel odyssey, fleeing into eastern Europe along with thousands of other refugees. Sent to Siberian slave labor camps in the wildernesses, they suffered brutal cold, famine, and disease. When Germany invaded Russia many refugees were forced out of Siberia to primitive tent camps in Uzbekistan, accompanied by the Polish army-in-exile previously imprisoned by the Soviets. Within weeks the commander of the army, General Wladyslaw Anders, received orders to relocate his army to Iran to train to fight alongside the British in North Africa. Instructed to leave without the civilians, Anders instead ordered all evacuees, including Jews, to head southward with his troops. Joe and the refugees were again loaded on trains, accompanied by the Polish soldiers, and sent to the port of Pahlavi on the Caspian Sea. Then, transported by trucks over treacherous mountain roads, they finally arrived in Tehran, where they struggled to survive in horrifying conditions. In October 1942, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem accepted responsibility for the nine hundred orphaned Jewish children in the camp, and by January 1943, the agency secured travel certificates for the Tehran Children to evacuate to Palestine. Joe and the other children, after five terrible years, finally reached safety at the Athlit Detention Camp, north of Haifa, on 18 February 1943. Readers will find the story is one of the swift brutalities of war, and the suffering of civilians swept up in the maelstrom of fierce conflict. A Train to Palestine recreates a remarkable, and little-known story of escape and survival during the Second World War.
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 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union 1939 1959 written by Katharina Friedla and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.
Download or read book Shrinking Violets written by Joe Moran and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Armchair Nation and On Roads examines shyness in a“sparkling cultural history rang[ing]from Jane Austen to Silicon Valley” (The Guardian). Shyness is a pervasive human trait: even most extroverts know what it is like to stand tongue-tied at the fringe of an unfamiliar group or flush with embarrassment at being the unwelcome center of attention. And yet the cultural history of shyness has remained largely unwritten—until now. With incisiveness, passion, and humor, Joe Moran offers an eclectic and original exploration of what it means to be a “shrinking violet.” Along the way, he provides a collective biography of shyness through portraits of such shy individuals as Charles Darwin, Charles Schulz, Garrison Keillor, and Agatha Christie, among many others. In their stories often both heartbreaking and inspiring and through the myriad ways scientists and thinkers have tried to explain and “cure” shyness, Moran finds hope. To be shy, he decides, is not simply a burden; it is also a gift, a different way of seeing the world that can be both enriching and inspiring. “Fantastic and involving . . . [A] feat of empathy. Every page radiates understanding; every paragraph, its (shy) author’s gentle wit.”—The Observer “Whether you’re boldly outgoing or reticent and self-effacing, you’ll find something to inspire, inform, or surprise in this thoughtful, beautifully written, and vividly detailed cultural history.”—Susan Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Quiet
Download or read book The Island of Extraordinary Captives written by Simon Parkin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting…truly shocking” (The New York Times Book Review) story of a Jewish orphan who fled Nazi Germany for London, only to be arrested and sent to a British internment camp for suspected foreign agents on the Isle of Man, alongside a renowned group of refugee musicians, intellectuals, artists, and—possibly—genuine spies. Following the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, Peter Fleischmann evaded the Gestapo’s roundups in Berlin by way of a perilous journey to England on a Kindertransport rescue, an effort sanctioned by the UK government to evacuate minors from Nazi-controlled areas.train. But he could not escape the British police, who came for him in the early hours and shipped him off to Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, under suspicion of being a spy for the very regime he had fled. During Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews like Peter escaped and found refuge in Britain. After war broke out and paranoia gripped the nation, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that these innocent asylum seekers—so-called “enemy aliens”—be interned. When Peter arrived at Hutchinson Camp, he found one of history’s most astounding prison populations: renowned professors, composers, journalists, and artists. Together, they created a thriving cultural community, complete with art exhibitions, lectures, musical performances, and poetry readings. The artists welcomed Peter as their pupil and forever changed the course of his life. Meanwhile, suspicions grew that a real spy was hiding among them—one connected to a vivacious heiress from Peter’s past. Drawing from unpublished first-person accounts and newly declassified government documents, award-winning journalist Simon Parkin reveals an “extraordinary yet previously untold true story” (Daily Express) that serves as a “testimony to human fortitude despite callous, hypocritical injustice” (The New Yorker) and “an example of how individuals can find joy and meaning in the absurd and mundane” (The Spectator).
Download or read book Jewish Refugees in Switzerland During the Holocaust written by Frieda Forman and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English-language memoir of the Jewish refugee experience in wartime Switzerland focusing on children's experiences and daily life in the refugee camps. The author integrates her memories of a refugee childhood with archival and historical research, including interviews. Fleeing the Nazis, the author's family was among the 25,000 Jews who sought refuge in Switzerland. The refugee camps were administered by Swiss government authorities with a peculiar mix of rigidity and compassion. Families were frequently separated, with men in one camp, and women and children in another. Thousands of refugee children were placed in foster care; many of them with non-Jewish foster families. At the same time, the refugees were allowed unparalleled scope for religious and cultural expression. Torn from a Jewish world that was fast disappearing, the refugees created a remarkable cultural life in the camps including educational programs for children and adults, vocational training, art classes for children, newspapers, theater productions, religious programs, music, lectures, and study groups. Paying particular attention to the experiences of women and children, the author explores the response of the Swiss Jewish community, and interviews some of the men and women who dealt with the refugees, including former welfare workers, camp administrators, and foster families. Research in the archives of the Swiss government, as well as of Jewish organizations, uncovers a treasure trove of official documents, along with refugee correspondence, photographs and children's art created in the camps. Original French, German, and Yiddish documents are translated into English for the first time to reveal the heated public debates about Switzerland's refugee policy and about the treatment of Jewish refugees.
Download or read book Soldiers written by Sonke Neitzel and published by Signal. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Netizel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington. These were discoveries that would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general -- almost all of whom had insisted on their own honourable behaviour during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations -- and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them -- from a historical and psychological perspective, and in reconstucting the frameworks and situations behind these conversations, they have created a powerful narrative of wartime experience.
Download or read book Mischling written by Affinity Konar and published by Lee Boudreaux Books. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past. Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad. It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain. That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks -- a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin -- travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it. A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope. "One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year"-Anthony Doerr about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II.
Download or read book The Second Homeland written by Anuradha Bhattacharjee and published by Sage Publications Pvt. Limited. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War presents the backdrop for this riveting account of displacement, migration and resettlement. Once the Soviet forces marched into Poland, thousands of Polish citizens were deported to slave-labour camps in the USSR. As news of their inhuman condition and ordeal spread, Jam Saheb Digvijaysinghji of Nawanagar, a Princely State in British India, opened the doors of his state and welcomed the orphaned Polish children. The Second Homeland chronicles the passage and sojourn of these young refugees. Readers will get an authentic account of their tribulations through the first-person narrative of a young Polish orphan′s hair-raising journey to India and his experiences during the stay. The book includes a historical perspective culled out from archival documents in India, the UK and Poland. This is a unique mix of a diary, oral history and historical viewpoint placed adjacent to a compilation of archival personal photographs. The book beautifully brings out a little-known aspect of European exiles in India during Second World War.
Download or read book Night Without End written by Jan Grabowski and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three million Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, wiping out nearly 98 percent of the Jewish population who had lived and thrived there for generations. Night Without End tells the stories of their resistance, suffering, and death in unflinching, horrific detail. Based on meticulous research from across Poland, it concludes that those who were responsible for so many deaths included a not insignificant number of Polish villagers and townspeople who aided the Germans in locating and slaughtering Jews. When these findings were first published in a Polish edition in 2018, a storm of protest and lawsuits erupted from Holocaust deniers and from people who claimed the research was falsified and smeared the national character of the Polish people. Night Without End, translated and published for the first time in English in association with Yad Vashem, presents the critical facts, significant findings, and the unmistakable evidence of Polish collaboration in the genocide of Jews.
Download or read book The Origins of the Final Solution written by Christopher R. Browning and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking work is the most detailed, carefully researched, and comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Nazi policy from the persecution and "ethnic cleansing" of Jews in 1939 to the Final Solution of the Holocaust in 1942.
Download or read book Stalin s Ni os written by Karl D. Qualls and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin’s Niños examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly three thousand child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs uncovers a little-known story that describes the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and reveals the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviours. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, comradery, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others. Throughout their fourteen-year existence and even during the horrific relocation to the Soviet interior during the Second World War, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – transformed displaced niños into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and in some cases valuable resources helping to rebuild Cuba after the revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity.
Download or read book The Universal Jew written by Mikhal Dekel and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.
Download or read book Illegal Traveller written by S. Khosravi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on fieldwork among undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers Illegal Traveller offers a narrative of the polysemic nature of borders, border politics, and rituals and performances of border-crossing. Interjecting personal experiences into ethnographic writing it is 'a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context'.
