Download or read book Motherland written by Fern Schumer Chapman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving account of a mother and daughter who visit Germany to face the Holocaust tragedy that has caused their family decades of intergenerational trauma, from the author of Brothers, Sisters, Strangers Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award In 1938, when Edith Westerfeld was twelve, her parents sent her from Germany to America to escape the Nazis. Edith survived, but most of her family perished in the death camps. Unable to cope with the loss of her family and homeland, Edith closed the door on her past, refusing to discuss even the smallest details. Fifty-four years later, when the void of her childhood was consuming both her and her family, she returned to Stockstadt with her grown daughter Fern. For Edith the trip was a chance to reconnect and reconcile with her past; for Fern it was a chance to learn what lay behind her mother's silent grief. Together, they found a town that had dramatically changed on the surface, but which hid guilty secrets and lived in enduring denial. On their journey, Fern and her mother shared many extraordinary encounters with the townspeople and—more importantly—with one another, closing the divide that had long stood between them. Motherland is a story of learning to face the past, of remembering and honoring while looking forward and letting go. It is an account of the Holocaust’s lingering grip on its witnesses; it is also a loving story of mothers and daughters, roots, understanding, and, ultimately, healing.

Download or read book Holocaust to Resistance My Journey written by Suzanne Berliner Weiss and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-13T00:00:00Z with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holocaust to Resistance, My Journey is a powerful, awe-inspiring memoir from author and activist Suzanne Berliner Weiss. Born to Jewish parents in Paris in 1941, Suzanne was hidden from the Nazis on a farm in rural France. Alone after the war, she lived in progressive-run orphanages, where she gained a belief in peace and brotherhood. Adoption by a New York family led to a tumultuous youth haunted by domestic conflict, fear of nuclear war and anti-communist repression, consignment to a detention home and magical steps toward relinking with her origins in Europe. At age seventeen, Suzanne became a lifelong social activist, engaged in student radicalization, the Cuban Revolution, and movements for Black Power, women’s liberation, peace in Vietnam and freedom for Palestine. Now nearing eighty, Suzanne tells how the ties of friendship, solidarity and resistance that saved her as a child speak to the needs of our planet today.

Download or read book Roads to Extinction written by Philip Friedman and published by Conference. This book was released on 1980 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles, some of them published previously. Partial contents:

Download or read book Black Earth written by Timothy Snyder and published by Tim Duggan Books. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, haunting, and profoundly original portrait of the defining tragedy of our time. In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was --and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.

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 A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz written by Göran Rosenberg and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This shattering memoir by a journalist about his father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden won the prestigious August Prize On August 2, 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town to begin his life anew. Having endured the ghetto of Lodz, the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany, his final challenge is to survive the survival. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood to tell the story of his father: walking at his side, holding his hand, trying to get close to him. It is also the story of the chasm between the world of the child, permeated by the optimism, progress, and collective oblivion of postwar Sweden, and the world of the father, darkened by the long shadows of the past.

Download or read book The Hard Road of Dreams written by Robert Kahn and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born under the influence of Nazi Germany, Robert Kahn's emotional journey plunges the reader through shifting shades of darkness and his eventual escape. This unusual and intriguing autobiography details a man's personal triumph while dealing with family, identity and traditions. His later contributions to the Department of Defense are startling in spite of his aversion to warfare. Written with honesty and determination - this autobiography contains no dramatization, only the rough edges of life.

Download or read book Displaced A Holocaust Memoir and the Road to a New Beginning written by Todd M. Mealy and published by Sunbury Press. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displaced is Linda Schwab's Holocaust memoir, a retelling of her experience surviving 18 months in a man-made cave, another year as an exile in Poland and Germany, and three years as a refugee in a displaced persons camp. Just six years old when a band of Nazi soldiers arrived in her tiny shtetl in Myadel, Poland, Linda observed atrocities no child ever needs to witness. With her parents and two brothers, during the summer of 1942, Linda was forcibly relocated into a ghetto where most of the Jewish men were led to the nearby forest and killed in a pogrom. After the massacre, Linda escaped with her family into the Ponar Forest, but only after evading Polish nationals and Nazis that patrolled Poland's countryside. Deep in the woods, Linda's family lived in a cave. They survived brutal winters, eluded partisan fighters that might force Linda's father to leave the family, and remained out of sight from Nazis and Polish police, who at one point, came only feet from their dugout.Written with historian Todd M. Mealy during a time when Holocaust deniers aim to rehabilitate the Nazi ideology and as roughly 400,000 survivors remain with us, Displaced presents Schwab's singular voice. Her narrative will help maintain-if not bolster-Holocaust knowledge, as her story of surviving the Polish wilderness during WWII and in a Displaced Persons Camp after the war is unique from most accounts. Displaced will inspire the rest of us to confront hatred in its many forms

Download or read book Questions I Am Asked about the Holocaust written by Hédi Fried and published by . This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young readers' edition of the bestselling book from Auschwitz survivor Hédi Fried that answers lasting questions about the Holocaust. Hédi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis arrested her family and transported them to Auschwitz. While there, apart from enduring the daily terror at the camp, she and her sister were forced into hard labor before being released at the end of the war. After settling in Sweden, Hédi devoted her life to educating young people about the Holocaust. In her 90s, she decided to take the most common questions, and her answers, and turn them into a book so that children all over the world could understand what had happened. This is a deeply human book that urges us never to forget and never to repeat. 'Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.' Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book How Did It Happen written by Christoph Dieckmann and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling book, Lithuanian author Ruta Vanagaite holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann. His exploration of the causes and consequences of the Holocaust in Lithuania provides the first overview for general readers that considers the perspectives of all the central groups involved—Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Drawing on a rich array of sources in all the key languages—Yiddish, Ivrit, Lithuanian, and German—Dieckmann considers not only the Berlin-based orientation of the German perpetrators but also the space where the Shoah took place—Lithuanian society with its Jewish minority under German occupation. He contends that this “space” of mass crimes is always linked with warfare and occupation. The Holocaust was unprecedented, but he makes a powerful case it cannot be isolated from the other mass crimes that took place at the same time in the same space against thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and forced refugees from the Soviet territories. Dieckmann shows that the Holocaust could not have unfolded throughout German-dominated Europe without the conditional cooperation of non-Germans in each occupied country. Existing antisemitism was radicalized from the 1930s onward, turning Jews, under the enormous stress of unrelenting warfare and often instable conditions of occupation, into what were perceived as deadly enemies. The Holocaust, its history and memory, can only be understood through this broader context. The authors’ searching exchanges illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

Download or read book I Want You to Know We re Still Here written by Esther Safran Foer and published by Crown. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS FINALIST • “Part personal quest, part testament, and all thoughtfully, compassionately written.”—The Washington Post “Esther Safran Foer is a force of nature: a leader of the Jewish people, the matriarch of America’s leading literary family, an eloquent defender of the proposition that memory matters. And now, a riveting memoirist.”—Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married, and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching. So when Esther’s mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation—that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust—Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn. I Want You to Know We’re Still Here is the poignant and deeply moving story not only of Esther’s journey but of four generations living in the shadow of the Holocaust. They are four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers, determined not just to keep the past alive but to imbue the present with life and more life.

Download or read book Cilka s Journey written by Heather Morris and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the multi-million copy bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz comes a new novel based on a riveting true story of love and resilience. Her beauty saved her — and condemned her. Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian prison camp. But did she really have a choice? And where do the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was send to Auschwitz when she was still a child? In Siberia, Cilka faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she meets a kind female doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing and begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions. Confronting death and terror daily, Cilka discovers a strength she never knew she had. And when she begins to tentatively form bonds and relationships in this harsh, new reality, Cilka finds that despite everything that has happened to her, there is room in her heart for love. From child to woman, from woman to healer, Cilka's journey illuminates the resilience of the human spirit—and the will we have to survive.

Download or read book Eternal Treblinka written by Charles Patterson and published by Lantern Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the similar attitudes and methods behind modern society's treatment of animals and the way humans have often treated each other, most notably during the Holocaust. The book's epigraph and title are from "The Letter Writer," a story by the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka." The first part of the book (Chapter 1-2) describes the emergence of human beings as the master species and their domination over the rest of the inhabitants of the earth. The second part (Chapters 3-5) examines the industrialization of slaughter (of both animals and humans) that took place in modern times. The last part of the book (Chapters 6-8) profiles Jewish and German animal advocates on both sides of the Holocaust, including Isaac Bashevis Singer himself. The Foreword is by Lucy Rosen Kaplan, former attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her foreword, the Preface and Afterword, excerpts from the book, chapter synopses, and an international list of supporters can be found on the book's website at: www.powerfulbook.com

Download or read book Wannsee written by Peter Longerich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete story of the Wannsee Conference, the meeting that paved the way for the Holocaust. On 20 January 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. The exquisite position by the lake, the imposing driveway up to the villa, culminating in a generously sized roundabout in front of the house, the expansive, carefully landscaped park, the generous suite of rooms that opened on to the park and the lake, the three-level terrace that stretched the entire garden side of the house, and the winter garden with its marble fountain, all give today's visitor to the villa a good idea of its owner's aspiration to build a sophisticated, almost palatial structure as a testament to his cultivation and worldly success. But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'. According to the surviving records of the meeting, items on the agenda included the precise definition of exactly which group of people was to be affected, followed by a discussion of how upwards of eleven million people were to be deported and subjected to the toughest form of forced labour, and following on from this a discussion of how the survivors of this forced labour as well as those not capable of it were ultimately to be killed. The next item on the agenda was breakfast.

Download or read book The Road to Rescue written by Mietek Pemper and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A deepening of the story” of Schindler’s List: A Holocaust survivor recounts how he extracted Nazi intel for Oskar Schindler in this moving memoir of courage and resistance (New York Times Book Review). Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List popularized the true story of a German businessman who manipulated his Nazi connections and spent his personal fortune to save 1,200 Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. But few know those lists were made possible by a secret strategy designed by a young Polish Jew at the Płaszow concentration camp. Mietek Pemper’s compelling and moving memoir tells the true story of how Schindler’s list really came to pass. Pemper was born in 1920 into a lively and cultivated Jewish family for whom everything changed when the Germans invaded Poland. Evicted from their home, they were forced into the Krakow ghetto and, later, into the nearby camp of Płaszow where Pemper’s knowledge of the German language was put to use by the sadistic camp commandant Amon Goth. Forced to work as Goth’s personal stenographer from March 1943 to September 1944—an exceptional job for a Jewish prisoner—Pemper soon realized that he could use his position as the commandant’s private secretary to familiarize himself with the inner workings of the Nazi bureaucracy and exploit the system to his fellow detainees’ advantage. Once he gained access to classified documents, Pemper was able to pass on secret information for Schindler to compile his famous lists. After the war, Pemper was the key witness of the prosecution in the 1946 trial against Goth and several other SS officers. The Road to Rescue stands as a historically authentic testimony of one man’s unparalleled courage, wit, defiance, and bittersweet victory over the Nazi regime.

Download or read book A Train Near Magdeburg the Young Adult Adaptation written by Matthew A. Rozell and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Young Adult Adaptation of the True Story of the Rescue of a Holocaust Death Train in World War IIAS A YOUNG TEEN living a comfortable life with family, what do you do when the Germans march into your town to persecute you, and your neighbors and your friends turn their backs? As life turns upside-down and you are now a young prisoner-fighting for survival in a concentration camp and FORCED TO BOARD A DEATH TRAIN to nowhere-how do you go on as people are dying all around you?AS A YOUNG AMERICAN SOLDIER in World War II, fighting brutal battles across Europe-having been shot at and shelled, having seen your friends killed, and no longer even able to remember what your own mother looks like-what is the plan when you STUMBLE ACROSS A HOLOCAUST TRAIN full of suffering families that shocks you to your core, even after you think you have seen it all? And what happens when the SOLDIERS AND SURVIVORS again MEET FACE TO FACE, seven decades later? "I survived because of many miracles. but for me to actually meet and cry together with my liberators-the 'angels of life' who literally gave me back my life-was just beyond imagination!" -Leslie Meisels, Holocaust survivor

Download or read book The Road to September 1939 written by Jehuda Reinharz and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface: "The Birds Left Early"--"A Million Superfluous Jews" -- and More -- "The Dream of a Jewish State" -- "The Wailing Wall in Évian" and Kristallnacht -- Funeral March at St. James's Palace: "They Betrayed Czechoslovakia, Why Should They Not Betray Us as Well?" -- A Bridge Over the White Paper? -- The Forgotten Congress (Geneva, August 16-25, 1939) -- Will War Break Out? -- "So early, no one has seen death yet" -- Epilogue