Download or read book The Nicest Nazi Childhood Memories of World War II written by Christiane Faris and published by . This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The childhood memories of a young German girl who suffered through the Nazi era during WWII.
Download or read book Memories of a German Childhood written by Niels Buessem and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the author's father died, just 6 months short of his 90th birthday, the personal effects he left behind included the scientific papers he had written over the years, a few private letters, and lots of old photographs. Looking at pictures of what must have been his father's friends and colleagues from boarding school, university, and his days as a scientist in Germany, the author realized then how little he knew about his father's early life, and that he had waited too long to ask. His father had lived in a most interesting time. He was a young boy during World War I, had experienced the early days of electricity, radio, automobiles, and indoor plumbing, lived through Germany's great upheaval in the 1920s, witnessed both the rise and the fall of the Nazis, survived military service in World War II, and was lucky enough to be one of the German scientists recruited to come to the United States after the war. Yet he had seldom talked about the details of his life in Germany. At the time, the author thought about writing down his own reminiscences. He too had lived an interesting life, having grown up in Nazi Germany during World War II. Wouldn't his sons and their children be interested in reading about their father's (and grandfather's) background and experiences? He thought they might be. After all, it is part of their heritage. But it wasn't until about a year ago that he started to write about his childhood memories. And an amazing thing happened. The more he wrote, the more he remembered. Long forgotten details-even the essence of conversations-came back to him in great clarity. He was able to remember particulars that had been in deep storage for all these years. The firstfourteen years of his life had been very different from the life led by his American friends, classmates, and colleagues. His family had lived through and survived a brutal regime and a devastating war. Luck played a large part in their being able to survive as a family and to move to the United States, while others they knew lost their homes, or friends in concentration camps, or husbands and fathers in battle. But as a child the author didn't dwell much on his good fortune. Instead he just concentrated on coping with whatever situation he would find himself in, and surviving as best he could. Writing down his memories, however, has made him realize just how very lucky he had been.
Download or read book A Past in Hiding written by Mark Roseman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heart-stopping survivor story and brilliant historical investigation that offers unprecedented insight into daily life in the Third Reich and the Holocaust and the powers and pitfalls of memory. At the outbreak of World War II, Marianne Strauss, the sheltered daughter of well-to-do German Jews, was an ordinary girl, concerned with studies, friends, and romance. Almost overnight she was transformed into a woman of spirit and defiance, a fighter who, when the Gestapo came for her family, seized the moment and went underground. On the run for two years, Marianne traveled across Nazi Germany without papers, aided by a remarkable resistance organization, previously unknown and unsung. Drawing on an astonishing cache of documents as well as interviews on three continents, historian Mark Roseman reconstructs Marianne's odyssey and reveals aspects of life in the Third Reich long hidden from view. As Roseman excavates the past, he also puts forward a new and sympathetic interpretation of the troubling discrepancies between fact and recollection that so often cloud survivors' accounts. A detective story, a love story, a story of great courage and survival under the harshest conditions, A Past in Hiding is also a poignant investigation into the nature of memory, authenticity, and truth.
Download or read book Childhood Memories Surviving World War II written by Karin Bartsch and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells a personal story of a child driven away from his homeland under life-threatening circumstances. Having to endure unbearable cold, thirst, hunger, pains, being tired, soooo tired....
Download or read book Frederike Helwig Kriegskinder written by Frederike Helwig and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. This book was released on 2017 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What were my parents doing when they were as old as my son is today? What made them what they are today?" These questions are examined by the photographer Frederike Helwig in her book Kriegskinder (Children of War). People who were born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, who grew up during World War II, are now in their eighth decade of life. They look back, some of them speaking for the first time ever about what marked them: bombs, fleeing, fear, hunger, illness, death, missing fathers, overwhelmed mothers--as well as the speechlessness of the post-war era, when memories of the war and its intergenerational consequences were supposed to be forgotten. The forty-five haunting portraits--all of them taken recently with an analog camera--are contrasted with the narratives of childhood experiences told by eyewitnesses. This makes Kriegskinder a portrait of a generation whose memories will soon disappear with them.Exhibition: 2.2.-8.4.2018, f3 - freiraum für fotografie, Berlin
Download or read book Five Days That Shocked the World written by Nicholas Best and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the momentous days from April 28 to May 2, 1945, the world witnessed the death of two Fascist dictators and the fall of Berlin. Mussolini's capture and execution by Italian partisans, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and the fall of the German capital signaled the end of the four-year war in the European Theater. In Five Days That Shocked the World, Nicholas Best thrills readers with the first-person accounts of those who lived through this dramatic time. In this valuable work of history, the author's special achievement is weaving together the reports of famous and soon-to-be-famous individuals who experienced the war up close. We follow a young Walter Cronkite as he parachutes into Holland with a Canadian troop; photographer Lee Miller capturing the evidence of Nazi atrocities; the future Pope Benedict returning home and hoping not to get caught and shot after deserting his infantry unit; Audrey Hepburn no longer having to fear conscription into a Wehrmacht brothel; and even an SS doctor's descriptions of a decadent sex orgy in Hitler's bunker. In skillfully synthesizing these personal narratives, Best creates a compelling chronicle of the five earth-shaking days when Fascism lost it death grip on Europe. With this vivid and fast-paced narrative, the author reaffirms his reputation as an expert on the final days of great wars.
Download or read book Witnesses of War written by Nicholas Stargardt and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2006 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text breaks new ground in its exploration of the lives and fate of the children of all nationalities under the Nazi regime.
Download or read book Childhood Memories of World War II written by Eva Rappart Edmands and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inside the Third Reich written by Albert Speer and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES
Download or read book Behind the Secret Window written by Nelly S. Toll and published by Dial. This book was released on 1993 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis come to Poland when Nelly is six. By the time she turns eight, the events of World War II have taken almost everyone she loves. Scared, lonely, and running from the Nazis, Nelly hides in the bedroom of a Gentile couple in Poland. For over a year, she lives in fear of discovery, writing in her diary and painting pictures of a fantasy world filled with open skies and happy families. Illustrated with Nelly's original watercolors, this powerful memoir tells the true story of how a little girl's imagination helped her survive a nightmare.
Download or read book The Nazi s Granddaughter written by Silvia Foti and published by Regnery History. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hero–or Nazi? Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.
Download or read book Hitler s American Friends written by Bradley W. Hart and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.
Download or read book Looking for the Good War written by Elizabeth D. Samet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.
Download or read book Searching for Home written by Joseph Gosler and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My name is Pietje Dijkstra not Josje Gosler!", he states tearfully when goaded by his cousin. The story of a child survivor, a Jewish boy who is hidden in the Netherlands during WWII. His porcelain psyche is damaged and his closest companion is fear. Ever wandering and struggling to find himself, we watch the young boy become a man.
Download or read book The Shame of Survival written by Ursula Mahlendorf and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While we now have a great number of testimonials to the horrors of the Holocaust from survivors of that dark episode of twentieth-century history, rare are the accounts of what growing up in Nazi Germany was like for people who were reared to think of Adolf Hitler as the savior of his country, and rarer still are accounts written from a female perspective. Ursula Mahlendorf, born to a middle-class family in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, was the daughter of a man who was a member of the SS at the time of his early death in 1935. For a long while during her childhood she was a true believer in Nazism—and a leader in the Hitler Youth herself. This is her vivid and unflinchingly honest account of her indoctrination into Nazism and of her gradual awakening to all the damage that Nazism had done to her country. It reveals why Nazism initially appealed to people from her station in life and how Nazi ideology was inculcated into young people. The book recounts the increasing hardships of life under Nazism as the war progressed and the chaos and turmoil that followed Germany’s defeat. In the first part of this absorbing narrative, we see the young Ursula as she becomes an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and then goes on to a Nazi teacher-training school at fifteen. In the second part, which traces her growing disillusionment with and anger at the Nazi leadership, we follow her story as she flees from the Russian army’s advance in the spring of 1945, works for a time in a hospital caring for the wounded, returns to Silesia when it is under Polish administration, and finally is evacuated to the West, where she begins a new life and pursues her dream of becoming a teacher. In a moving Epilogue, Mahlendorf discloses how she learned to accept and cope emotionally with the shame that haunted her from her childhood allegiance to Nazism and the self-doubts it generated.
Download or read book Destined to Witness written by Hans Massaquoi and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of the unexpected.In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir -- an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer's spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door -- or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic,, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi's account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.
Download or read book Those Who Forget written by Geraldine Schwarz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).
