Download or read book Defiance written by Nechama Tec and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-26 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.
Download or read book Brothers in Arms written by Peter Duffy and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It sounds like something from ancient mythology- three brothers living near the edge of a forest witness the coming of an invading army. They arm themselves, take to their horses and seek refuge in the woods they know as well as they know anything. The enemy arrives and systematically starts killing the long-oppressed minority to which the brothers belong. Horrified and angered, they lead guerrilla attacks against the enemy's installations and exact vicious revenge on local collaborators. Prompted by the eldest, who is selected as commander, the brothers and a growing numbers of warriors begin a campaign to save all their people, including the weak, the young, the old, the sick. Slowly the group evolves into a makeshift forest city with a hospital, workshops, a school and even a bathhouse. When the invading army retreats, the brothers emerge from the woods- the saviours of 1,250 people.
Download or read book Fugitives of the Forest written by Allan Levine and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heroic story of Jewish resistance and survival during the Second World War.
Download or read book The Bielski Brothers written by Peter Duffy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblings being led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would, of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running or giving in to despair, these brothers -- Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski -- fought back, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis. By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding the Belarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to join their ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day, a robust community began to emerge, a "Jerusalem in the woods." After two and a half years in the woods, in July 1944, the Bielskis learned that the Germans, overrun by the Red Army, were retreating back toward Berlin. More than one thousand Bielski Jews emerged -- alive -- on that final, triumphant exit from the woods.
Download or read book Beyond Courage written by Doreen Rappaport and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the efforts of Jews who organized others and sabotaged the Nazis during the Holocaust, including Georges Loinger who smuggled children from occupied France into Switzerland and four brothers who led refugees into the forest to build a village and an army.
Download or read book Into the Forest written by Rebecca Frankel and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.
Download or read book The Bielski Brothers written by Larry Slawson and published by Larry Slawson via PublishDrive. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the lives and legacy of the Bielski Brothers during World War Two, and their efforts to save nearly 1,200 Jews from Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Hidden written by Fay Walker and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002-09-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the Rosenbluth family, only the older children, Faiga and Luzer, had gone into hiding before the SS rounded up the Jews of Kanczuga, Poland. Hidden is Faiga and Luzer’s story, a memoir whose intimate and quiet particularity makes the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real. In alternating first-person narratives, Faiga (Fay) and Luzer (Leo) take readers into their very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, the once-dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister’s fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler’s only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows’ warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war’s end, back once more into the world—but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confident, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.
Download or read book Saving One s Own written by Mordecai Paldiel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-02 with total page 893 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable, historically significant book, Mordecai Paldiel recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which, at great risk to their own lives, Jews rescued other Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing he puts to rest the widely held belief that all Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe wore blinders and allowed themselves to be led like "lambs to the slaughter." Paldiel documents how brave Jewish men and women saved thousands of their fellow Jews through efforts unprecedented in Jewish history. Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One's Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers' dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation. The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy--and in saving literally thousands of Jews--is finally revealed.
Download or read book Paula s Window written by Paula Burger and published by . This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Paula's story is a testament to the spirit of survival in inhumane times and the triumph of life over those seeking to destroy it. If we carefully read and learn from her experience, we will dedicate ourselves, each generation, to ensuring the present and future dignity of all people"--Back cover.
Download or read book When Light Pierced the Darkness written by Nechama Tec and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] excellent book...Not only...the first thorough treatment of the subject, but it is also charged with a poignancy that only a survivor can summon"--The Philadelphia Inquirer. "A remarkable book"--The New York Review of Books. Like Anne Frank but more fortunate, Nechama Tec was one of the "hidden children"--Jews taken in and protected from the Holocaust by Christian families. Here she examines the role of Christians in saving Jewish lives, showing the personal reality of how individuals resisted the Nazi onslaught.
Download or read book Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans written by Jack Kagan and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two cousins relate their experiences with Bielski's partisan brigade in war-torn Russia during the Second World War. Natives of Novogrodek, part of present-day Belarus, they describe Jewish life before the Holocaust and furnish a most moving account of how a thriving and prosperous Jewish center was decimated by the Nazis and local collaborators. Initial joy when their hometown was taken over by the Soviet Union disappeared when the Germans ran the Russians out of town and started implementing policies to eradicate all Jews and anything Jewish. Dov (Berl), the elder of the cousins, whose account comprises the first section of the book, lost his immediate family in the early days of German occupation and escaped from ghetto life in November 1942 to join the partisans in the dense forests of the area. He joined the Kalinin brigade and spent the rest of the war fighting the Germans and Russian sympathisers. Jack (Idel), seven years his junior, remained in the ghetto with the remnants of their once-large family. After a failed attempt in December 1942 to escape to reach the partisans - in an episode which nearly cost him his life - Jack joined an escape effort from the ghetto in September 1943, successfully reached the partisans as a member of Bielski's partisan brigade and was reunited with his cousin. This second section features many original documents from Russian archives and elsewhere, about the partisan bands' structure and their activities. The authors provide a unique view, not only of actual incidents, but of how two different people react to events and experiences. Updated in this second edition by a new preface and appendix, this is their story: a tale of tragedy, courage and triumph.
Download or read book Resistance written by Nechama Tec and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this careful study of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance during World War II, Holocaust scholar Tec Nechama argues that Jews were not passive or submissive in the face of German oppression, but that their efforts had different aims and expressions than those of their non-Jewish counterparts.
Download or read book Nowhere s Child written by Kari Rosvall and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is a beautifully written story. Of healing and love - and pain. Reading this book is like sitting in front of Kari, listening to her opening her heart to you' Irish Times Kari Rosvall's early life was shrouded in mystery until, at age 64, she received a letter through the post. In it was a photograph of herself as a young baby - the only one she had ever seen. This was the first step towards her discovery of the dark secret of her conception. Kari soon learned that she was a Lebensborn child, part of Hitler's 'Spring of Life' programme, which encouraged Nazi soldiers to have children with Scandinavian women in order to create an Aryan race. And so began a journey back to her roots: to Norway, where she was taken from her mother and sent to Germany in a crate to join the other Lebensborn children, and to post-war Germany and her eventual rescue by the Red Cross from an attic. Nowhere's Child is a remarkable story of reconciliation and of forging new beginnings from a dark past. Ultimately, for this woman who set up a new life in Ireland, it is the life-affirming account of what it really means to find a place called home.
Download or read book There Once Was a World written by Yaffa Eliach and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 1999-10-06 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 900 years the Polish shtetl was a home to generations of Jewish families. In 1944 almost every Jew was murdered and with them died a way of life that had survived for centuries. Yaffa Eliach has written a landmark history of the shtetl.
Download or read book Violins and Hope written by DANIEL. WELSER-MOEST LEVIN (FRANZ.) and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles the story of how violins from the Holocaust now sing in symphony halls.
Download or read book Mordecai written by Emily Bingham and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
