Download or read book Sobibor the Forgotten Revolt written by Thomas Toivi Blatt and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Promise at Sobib r written by Philip “Fiszel” Bialowitz and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war. Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust. In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
Download or read book Escape from Sobibor written by Richard L. Rashke and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story reconstructed from the diaries, notes, and memories of the six hundred Jews who revolted, three hundred of whom escaped the death camp Sobibor.
Download or read book To Survive Sobibor written by Dov Fraiberg and published by Gefen Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dov Freiberg was only twelve when he was hurled into the crushing events of the German occupation of Poland. His father was killed by German soldiers in the first days of the war, and his mother fought valiantly to keep her four children fed as the ghetto walls grew more and more constricting. Smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto, young Dov was soon captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in the living hell of Sobibor death camp, where he witnessed the extermination of his people. One of several hundred inmates to escape during the prisoners revolt, he began anew his struggle for life in the unfriendly forests of occupied Poland. By the time the Soviet army liberated the region nine long months later, Freiberg found himself the lone survivor of his family. This is a story of the struggle for survival and for sanity throughout the inhuman experiences of the Holocaust and the postwar years. The author paints a phenomenally detailed picture of an individual life and of the lives of the Jews of Poland before their destruction, during the occupation and the Holocaust, and after liberation by the Soviet army. With its comprehensive description of Sobibor and the prisoners revolt, this is not only the fascinating memoir of an extraordinary life but also a valuable historical testimony.
Download or read book Sasha Pechersky written by Selma Leydesdorff and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world
Download or read book From the Ashes of Sobibor written by Thomas Toivi Blatt and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blatt's account of his childhood in Izbica provides a fascinating glimpse of Jewish life in Poland after the German invasion and during the period of mass deportations of Jews to the camps. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five horrifying years spent eluding both the Nazis and later anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is a firsthand account of one of the most terrifying and savage events of human history.
Download or read book Surviving the Holocaust written by Avraham Tory and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.
Download or read book Saving Children written by Jack Werber and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saving Children, Jack Werber describes in detail what life in Buchenwald was like, painting a haunting picture of his daily struggle for survival. But Werber did more than survive; he made saving children his special mission. In what is one of the most amazing stories of the Holocaust, Jack Werber helped to save the lives of some seven hundred Jewish children who had arrived at Buchenwald in late 1944, including Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel. At great personal risk, he arranged for the children to be hidden in various barracks with false working papers. He and his group actually started a school where the children studied Jewish history, music, and Hebrew. These activities gave the youngsters hope that they might survive and ultimately most of them did. Werber’s entire family—his wife, daughter, parents, and seven siblings—were all murdered by the Nazis. "There was no reason to go on," he had thought, but seeing the children transformed his outlook. He resolved to prevent them from meeting his daughter’s fate. Out of 3,200 Polish prisoners who entered the camp together with Werber, only eleven were alive by war’s end. Of those, he was the only Jew.
Download or read book Mielec Poland written by Rochelle G. Saidel and published by Gefen Publishing House Ltd. This book was released on 2012 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book''s 45 visuals include rare documentation of correspondence during the Holocaust. Author Dr Rochelle G Saidel''s research was carried out as a Research Fellow at the Yad Vashem International Research Institute, as well as under the auspices of Remember the Women Institute. Mielec, Poland, is just one of many small dots on the map of the Holocaust, but its remarkable and unique history calls for closer scrutiny. Using an experimental process that was not repeated, the Nazis destroyed the Mielec Jewish community on March 9, 1942. After murdering those deemed too old or disabled to be useful, the German occupiers selected able-bodied survivors (mostly men) for slave labour and then deported the rest (4,000 mostly women, some with children) to another sector of the Generalgouvernement, the Lublin district. This process was recorded not only by the Nazis, but also by some members of the local Jewish and non-Jewish population. The visual and written documentation in this book allows us to learn about the Jewish community that had flourished in Mielec until the Holocaust, as well as the unusual way in which it was wiped out by the Nazis. In addition, testimonies and war criminal trial records describe an almost unknown brutal slave labour camp that operated on the outskirts of Mielec from before March 1942 until July 1944. Mielec is located in the Rzeszów province in southern Poland, quite close to Tarnów (and was in the Kraków district of the Generalgouvernement). Both the Jewish community and the concentration camp of Mielec have almost vanished from history, and evidence at the site is sparse. Nevertheless, what happened there can be recounted using old and new testimonies, rare photographs and documents, survivor interviews, and archival material. With the exception of a small number of people fortunate enough to survive by running and hiding, the entire population was murdered, sent to slave labor camps, or later deported to death camps from the Lublin district. Mielec was the first town in the Generalgouvernement from which the entire Jewish population was deported in the context of the Final Solution. The Nazis'' well-documented decision to deport the Jews of Mielec was made very early, in January 1942. Furthermore, after deportation to the Lublin district following an Aktion on March 9, 1942, the Mielec Jews were not murdered immediately. They were allowed to live for months under terrible circumstances in some of the small towns in that district, near Sobibór and Bełżec. Ultimately these two death camps would be the final destination for Mielec''s Jews. Another unusual aspect of the Mielec story is the labor camp that was located there. The site of the Polish National Aircraft Company (PZL), part of a Centralny Okreg Przemysłowy (Central Industrial District), was taken over by the Nazis for the manufacture of Heinkel airplanes. Later this work camp became a concentration camp, complete with tattoos and sadistic commandants. Despite these facts, histories of the Holocaust rarely mention Mielec. Today, this site is a Euro-Park industrial complex. The rare visuals about Mielec during the Holocaust are from survivor Moshe Borger (who was given a photograph album and correspondence by a Polish neighbour after World War II), from archives (the deportation), from research trips to Mielec, and from other survivors. Very early and much more recent survivor testimonies, as well as Nazi documentation, help to tell the story. The author interviewed survivors and also found Nazi war criminal trial records. Material from the unpublished manuscript of a Mielec concentration camp survivor and from the diary and unpublished manuscript of a Mielec shtetl survivor are included, as is testimony from a Mielec resident who was one of ten women to survive the Sobibór revolt. Research was carried out in Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Historical Research Institute in Warsaw, and on site in Mielec.
Download or read book Hunt for the Jews written by Jan Grabowski and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, “Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust” (European History Quarterly).
Download or read book The Last Consolation Vanished written by Zalmen Gradowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.
Download or read book Three Minutes in Poland written by Glenn Kurtz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--
Download or read book Treblinka written by Chil Rajchman and published by MacLehose Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded. In addition to Rajchman's account, this volume will include the complete text of Vasily Grossman's "The Hell of Treblinka," one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.
Download or read book Escaping Hell in Treblinka written by Israel Cymlich and published by Yad Vashem & the Holocaust Survivors Memoirs Project. This book was released on 2007 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents two accounts by Holocaust survivors. Cymlich's diary was written in 1943 in Polish; it appeared in Spanish translation as "Cuando vengas no encontrarás a nadie...: Diario de un joven judío en Polonia (1939-43)" (Buenos Aires: Acervo Cultural, 1999). The English translation was done by Jerzy Michalowicz. Strawczynski's memoirs appeared in English in "Clouds in the Thirties - on Antisemitism in Canada, 1929-1939" (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, 1981), translated from the Yiddish ["Bleter far Geszichte" 27 (1989)] by Natalie (Nadia) Strawczynski Rotter.
Download or read book The Memory Monster written by Yishai Sarid and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? Praise for The Memory Monster: “Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.” —Publishers Weekly “Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.” —Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “In Yishai Sarid’s dark, thoughtful novel The Memory Monster, a Holocaust historian struggles with the weight of his profession…. The Memory Monster is a novel that pulls no punches in its exploration of the responsibility—and the cost—of holding vigil over the past.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
Download or read book Death Camp Uprising written by Nelson Yomtov and published by Raintree. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the events that followed the Sobibor death camp prisoner's decision to escape. Readers will discover a powerful story of human courage and mankind's fierce will to live.
Download or read book The Dressmakers of Auschwitz written by Lucy Adlington and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps. At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust. Drawing on diverse sources—including interviews with the last surviving seamstress—The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.
