Download or read book German Boy written by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the experience of war for a child in bombed and ravaged Germany? In this memoir, the voice of innocence is heard. “This is great stuff,” exclaims Stephen E. Ambrose. “I love this book.” In this gripping account, a boy and his mother are wrenched from their tranquil lives to forge a path through the storm of war and the rubble of its aftermath. In the past there has been a spectrum of books and films that share other German World War II experiences. However, told from the perspective of a ten-year-old, this book is rare. The boy and his mother must prevail over hunger and despair, or die. In the Third Reich, young Wolfgang Samuel and his family are content but alone. The father, a Luftwaffe officer, is away fighting the Allies in the West. In 1945 as Berlin and nearby communities crumble, young Wolfgang, his mother Hedy, and little sister Ingrid flee the advancing Russian army. They have no inkling of the chaos ahead. In Strasburg, a small town north of Berlin where they find refuge, Wolfgang begins to comprehend the evils the Nazi regime brought to Germany. As the Reich collapses, mother, son, and daughter flee again just ahead of the Russian charge. In the chaos of defeat they struggle to find food and shelter. Death stalks the primitive camps that are their temporary havens, and the child becomes the family provider. Under the crushing responsibility, Wolfgang becomes his mother’s and sister’s mainstay. When they return to Strasburg, the Communists in control are as brutal as the Nazis. In the violent atmosphere of arbitrary arrest, rape, hunger, and fear, the boy and his mother persist. Pursued by Communist police through a fierce blizzard, they escape to the West, but even in the English zone, the constant search for food, warmth, and shelter dominates their lives, and the mother’s sacrifices become the boy’s nightmares. Although this is a time of deepest despair, Wolfgang hangs on to the thinnest thread of hope. In June 1948 with the arrival of the Americans flying the Berlin Airlift, Wolfgang begins a new journey.

Download or read book Boy Soldier written by Gerhardt B. Thamm and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As a 15-year-old boy I fought briefly in a war. My fight was neither noble nor heroic. I saw the horrors that no 15-year-old boy should ever see. I came into war purely by happenstance, and survived it purely by luck." Gerhardt B. Thamm grew up on his grandfather's farm in Lower Silesia, the hinterlands of Germany. In early 1945 this land, near the Czechoslovakian and Polish borders, became a battleground. The Soviets captured Lower Silesia in February, and Thamm, like many of his Hitler Youth high school classmates, was conscripted to fight on the Eastern Front until the last few days of World War II, experiencing firsthand fearsome barbarity and atrocity. Thamm's family was deported from Silesia in 1946 to West Germany. Gerhardt Thamm arrived in the United States in 1948. The 17-year-old Thamm joined the U.S. Army the same year and served more than 20 years as an enlisted man. "Maybe, just maybe, I fought in this war to escape the barbarity. Maybe I wrote this book to still the memories."

Download or read book The German Boy written by Tricia Wastvedt and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving, inter-war family saga The German Boy from Patricia Wastvedt, the Orange Prize Longlisted author of The River. In 1947, Elisabeth Mander's German nephew comes to stay: Stefan Landau, her dead sister's teenage son, whom she hates and loves before she's even set eyes on him. Orphaned by the war and traumatised by the last, vicious battles of the Hitler Youth, Stefan brings with him to England only a few meagre possessions. Among them a portrait of a girl with long copper hair by a young painter called Michael Ross - and with it the memory, both painful and precious, of her life and that time between the wars. Spanning decades and generations, The German Boy tells the moving story of two families entangled by love and friendship, divided by prejudice and war, and of a brief encounter between a woman and a man that touched each of their lives forever. 'An absorbing literary saga ... a sophisticated and subtly woven story' Daily Mail 'Hypnotic, atmospheric and exquisitely written. A novel I won't forget' Lucinda Riley, author of Hothouse Flower 'A love story at its centre which will make your heart ache' Julia Green, author of Blue Moon 'A heart-rending story of epic proportions, thrilling and utterly captivating. I am haunted by it still' Suzannah Dunn, author of The Confession of Katherine Howard Born in 1954, Patricia Wastvedt grew up in Blackheath, south London, and spent her summers in Kent. She has a degree in Creative Arts and an MA in Creative Writing, and her first novel, The River, written in her late forties, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Bath Spa University, and is also a manuscript editor. She lives and writes in a cottage in Somerset.

Download or read book The Boy Who Dared written by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newbery Honor Book author has written a powerful and gripping novel about a youth in Nazi Germany who tells the truth about Hitler. Susan Campbell Bartoletti has taken one episode from her Newbery Honor Book, Hitler Youth, and fleshed it out into thought-provoking novel. When 16-year-old Helmut Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers Germany is lying to the people. But when he tries to expose the truth with leaflets, he's tried for treason. Sentenced to death and waiting in a jail cell, Helmut's story emerges in a series of flashbacks that show his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times , to a sensitive and mature young man who thinks for himself.

Download or read book Hitler s Boy Soldiers written by Helene Munson and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how Germany's child soldiers fought WWII, told through the personal lens of the author's father's rediscovered journal and meticulous historical research

Download or read book The Boy written by Dan Porat and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cobblestone road. A sunny day. A soldier. A gun. A child, arms high in the air. A moment captured on film. But what is the history behind arguably the most recognizable photograph of the Holocaust? In The Boy: A Holocaust Story, the historian Dan Porat unpacks this split second that was immortalized on film and unravels the stories of the individuals—both Jews and Nazis—associated with it. The Boy presents the stories of three Nazi criminals, ranging in status from SS sergeant to low-ranking SS officer to SS general. It is also the story of two Jewish victims, a teenage girl and a young boy, who encounter these Nazis in Warsaw in the spring of 1943. The book is remarkable in its scope, picking up the lives of these participants in the years preceding World War I and following them to their deaths. One of the Nazis managed to stay at large for twenty-two years. One of the survivors lived long enough to lose a son in the Yom Kippur War. Nearly sixty photographs dispersed throughout help narrate these five lives. And, in keeping with the emotional immediacy of those photographs, Porat has deliberately used a narrative style that, drawing upon extensive research, experience, and oral interviews, places the reader in the middle of unfolding events.

Download or read book Jungvolk written by Wilhelm Gehlen and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary account of a young boy caught up in the middle of a war . . . frank and even funny at times . . . utterly absorbing” (Books Monthly). This is the wartime memoir of a boy named Will, who happened to be the nephew of the head of Nazi Germany’s intelligence agency. The author, only ten years old when the war began, became a helper at the local Luftwaffe flak battery, fetching ammunition. It was exciting work for Will, a member of the “Jungvolk,” and by the end of the war, he had become expert at judging attacks. As fighter raids increased in frequency, he noted that the pilots became less skilled. Gehlen’s town was repeatedly bombed, and he often had to help with the wreckage or to pull survivors from basements. He witnessed more death than a child ever should; nevertheless, his flak battery continued firing until US tanks were almost on top of the position. In this book, Gehlen provides an intimate glimpse of the chaos, horror, and black humor of life just behind the front lines. As seen through the eyes of a child who was expert in aircraft identification and bomb weights, food-rationing and tank types, one encounters a view of life inside Hitler’s wartime Reich that is both fascinating and rare. “Although the memories Gehlen shares are narrow, and offer little insight into the Reich itself, they’re remarkable for the child’s perspective they bring to bear on a warring country’s ferocious struggle.” —Publishers Weekly “A real gem, a quiet tour de force . . . Despite its serious subject matter the book reads as an adventure story from start to finish.” —Military Modelling

Download or read book What s to Become of the Boy Or Something to Do with Books written by Heinrich Böll and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1981, Heinrich Boll returned to the streets of his childhood in this remarkable collection of nonfiction. This volume captures the musings of a mature Boll as he looks back with fondness and with anger on his formative years: as a student who avoided school but lived for his education on the street; and as a young man forced to grapple with the moral horror that was Hitler. What's to Become of the Boy - superbly translated by Leila Vennewitz - provides uncommon insight into Boll's maturation as an author and as a man.

Download or read book The German Lesson written by Siegfried Lenz and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.” Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

Download or read book Boy with a Violin written by Yochanan Fein and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union began. In a matter of days, the war reached the suburbs of Kaunas, Lithuania, where a young Jewish violinist, Yochanan Fein, led a happy childhood. On June 22, 1941, that childhood ended. In Boy with a Violin, Fein recounts his early life under Nazi occupation—his survival in the Kaunas Ghetto, the separation from his parents, his narrow escapes from death at the hands of Nazi officers, the harrowing stories of those he knew who did not survive, and the abhorrent conditions he endured while in hiding. He tells the tale of his rescuer, Jonas Paulavičius, the Lithuanian carpenter who sought to save the Jewish spirit. Paulavičius rescued those he believed could rebuild in the wake of the Holocaust, hiding engineers and doctors in his underground Noah's Ark. Among the sixteen he saved stood one fourteen-year-old violinist. Following liberation, Fein describes the aftermath of the war as survivors returned to what was left of their homes and attempted to piece together the fragmented remains of their lives. He recounts the difficulties of returning to some semblance of normal life in the midst of a complex political climate, culminating in his daring escape from Soviet Lithuania. In one of the darkest eras of human history, there were those who proved that the goodness of the human spirit survives against all odds. Boy with a Violin pays tribute to those who risked everything to save a life, and whose altruism crossed the boundaries of race and religion. In this first English translation of Boy with a Violin, Fein continues to offer his testimony to the strength of the human spirit.

Download or read book The Boy Who Went to War written by Giles Milton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and true story of warfare and human survival that exposes a side of World War II that is unknown by many— this is the story of Wolfram Aïchele, a boy whose childhood was stolen by a war in which he had no choice but to fight. Giles Milton has been a writer and historian for many years, writing about people and places that history has forgotten. But it took his young daughter's depiction of a swastika on an imaginary family shield - the swastika representing Germany - for Giles to uncover the incredible, dark story of his own family and his father-in-law's life under Hitler's regime. As German citizens during World War II, Wolfram and his Bohemian, artist parents survived one of the most brutal eras of history. Wolfram, who was only nine years old when Hitler came to power, lived through the rise and fall of the Third Reich, from the earliest street marches to the final defeat of the Nazi regime. Conscripted into Hitler's army, he witnessed the brutality of war - first on the Russian front and then on the Normandy beaches. Seen through German eyes and written with remarkable sensitivity, The Boy Who Went to War is a powerful story of warfare and human survival and a reminder to us all that civilians on both sides suffered the consequences of Hitler's war.

Download or read book Dark Clouds Don t Stay Forever written by Werner Neuburger and published by Publishamerica Incorporated. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What made agooda Germans succumb to Hitleras Propaganda? Werner Neuburger grew up in Germany and witnessed just how Nazism took hold in a civilized society. He experienced the continuously increasing persecution of his family and fellow Jews. This is his heartbreaking storyaof small joys amidst severe personal harassments, his fatheras untimely death, his motheras repeated heroism, the atrocities of Kristal Nacht, and of his last-minute getaway to England on a aKinder Transport.a Werneras life in England was shaped by the start of World War II but was interrupted by his opportunity to emigrate to the USA. What were the first impressions of this new immigrant? How did he become Americanized? Throughout all these impacts on his life, he persevered and took hold of the opportunities America offered. In 1945, he was willingly drafted into the Army just in time for the last fighting in the Pacificaa colorful story in itself. After the war, he availed himself of the opportunity to forge a wonderful life and offers prudent insights on how to succeed. This is a remarkable family history written with insight and grace.

Download or read book Under Their Thumb written by Bill German and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age sixteen, Bill German began publishing a Rolling Stones fanzine out of his bedroom in Brooklyn. And when he presented an issue to the band on a street in New York, he obviously made an impression: before he knew it, the Stones had hired him to document their career, inviting him in to the studio and to their private jam sessions. He traveled the world with them, stayed at their homes, and, for almost two decades, witnessed their wild parties and nasty feuds. Yet through it all, he never lost his identity as that “nice boy from Brooklyn.” Under Their Thumb is a fish-out-of-water tale about a fan who wanted to know everything about his favorite rock group—and suddenly learned too much. This updated edition, published to mark the Stones’ sixtieth anniversary, features forty new pages of text and more than thirty never-before-seen photos.

Download or read book The German Officer s Boy written by Harlan Greene and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What really happened that afternoon in November 1938, when the young Polish Jew walked into the German embassy in Paris and shots rang out? The immediate consequence was concrete: Nazi Germany retaliated with the "Night of Broken Glass," recognized as the beginning of the Holocaust. Lost and overlooked in the aftermath is the arresting story of Herschel Grynszpan, the confused teenager whose murder of Ernst vom Rath was used to justify Kristallnacht. In this historical novel, award-winning writer Harlan Greene may be the first author to take the Polish Jew at his word. Historians have tried to explain away Herschel Grynszpan's claim that he was involved in a love affair with vom Rath; Greene, instead, traces the lives of the underprivileged and persecuted Herschel Grynszpan and the wealthy German diplomat Ernst vom Rath as they move inevitably towards their ill-fated affair. In spare, vivid, and compelling prose, Greene imagines their world, their relationship, and their last horrific encounter, as they tried to wrest love and meaning from a world that would itself soon disappear in a whirlwind of disaster and madness.

Download or read book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas written by John Boyne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover an extraordinary tale of innocence, friendship and the horrors of war. 'Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone' Nine-year-old Bruno has a lot of things on his mind. Who is the 'Fury'? Why did he make them leave their nice home in Berlin to go to 'Out-With' ? And who are all the sad people in striped pyjamas on the other side of the fence? The grown-ups won't explain so Bruno decides there is only one thing for it - he will have to explore this place alone. What he discovers is a new friend. A boy with the very same birthday. A boy in striped pyjamas. But why can't they ever play together? ‘A small wonder of a book’ Guardian BACKSTORY: Read an interview with the author JOHN BOYNE and learn all about the Second World War in Germany.

Download or read book They Thought They Were Free written by Milton Mayer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Download or read book The Boys Who Challenged Hitler written by Phillip Hoose and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The true story of a group of boy resistance fighters in Denmark after the Nazi invasion"--