Download or read book Nightmares of an East Prussian Childhood written by Ilse Stritzke and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mother of 11 year old Ilse Glaus turned down the last plane out of East Prussia ahead of the advancing Russians in order to stay back with her aged parents. That decision cost her family dearly in wartorn Europe, 1945. Ilse grew up on a small farm, with a wonderful family, the woods as a playground and the beaches of the Baltic. Then turmoil followed the German defeat by the Russians and the subsequent occupation. In 31 months under the Russians, Ilse's family is driven from their home, she mourns her missing father, witnesses her mother's rape, sees her grandparents and baby brother succumb to the brutal conditions, and hears of her oldest sister's capture and death in a work prison. Fighting starvation, Ilse crafts ways to coexist with the Russians, scavenging, begging and stealing to help the family survive.
Download or read book Ruined by the Reich written by Christel Weiss Brandenburg and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades have passed since World War II, yet the myth that all Germans were Nazi sympathizers still persists. This book follows the story of the Weiss family in East Prussia from World War I to the end of World War II. It is told from the point of view not of the victors but of the vanquished. Beginning with the good citizenship trap Hitler set for law-abiding German families, the book describes how Germany first prospered and then fell to ruin with the Third Reich. The people traded their freedoms for a national security, which quickly turned to tyranny with swift consequences for “disobedience.” Like Christel’s brothers (soldiers and members of Hitler’s Youth), propaganda-fed children all over the Reich believed the highly idealized depiction of their roles and of their nation’s victims. This fascinating and richly detailed memoir is told through the intimate narration of a woman who grew up in the midst of turmoil, experienced poverty and prejudice, witnessed the deaths of many loved ones, and was driven from her home by the Soviet Army. The combination of domestic details and vivid historical descriptions creates an unusual book as absorbing as it is educational.
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 A Child of East Prussia written by Hiltrud Maria Masuch Webber and published by H M W Publications. This book was released on 1996 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Forgotten Land written by Max Egremont and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its people through the stories of individuals who were intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, as well as accounts of his own travels and interviews he conducted along the way. Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.
Download or read book Yesterday s Sandhills written by Rita Baltutt Kyle and published by . This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the family of Rita Baltutt at the end of World War II in the part of Germany known as East Prussia. When the Soviets conquered East Prussia in 1945, like many other German children these four little girls were effectively orphaned when their parents were taken for forced labor into the Soviet Union. This is the story of their struggle for survival. Left to fend for themselves in a burned-out town, they faced starvation, dehydration, drunken Russian soldiers, and roving gangs of lawless boys.
Download or read book Farewell to East Prussia written by Erhard Schulz and published by . This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author describes his childhood on his parents' farm in East Prussia and the first school years in Erlenrode und Kuckerneese. The Second World War changes people's lives. As an eleven-year-old boy, along with his mother and two brothers, he experiences the Great Trek on a horse-drawn harvest wagon. It starts in October 1944 and ends six months later in April 1945, after a drive of more than 750 miles through East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Lower Saxony to Sievershausen near Hannover, Germany. The stages of their struggle and their encounters along the way are depicted with remarkable honesty. Many striking details, often strange and unimaginable, sometimes touching to the heart, are included.
Download or read book Childhood in Germany During World War II written by Karla O. Poewe and published by Lewiston, N.Y. : Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today a distinguished anthropologist, Karla Poewe was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, in 1941. In this autobiography, she tells of her early life as a vagrant refugee pursued by Russian armies and Allied bombs during World War II.
Download or read book The Home of My Heart written by Gerda Pleasants and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I am writing this book for myself and my children, and also to keep alive the memory of my home in East Prussia. This home as I knew it no longer exists; most of the people you will read about have died, many of the building have disappeared, and even the towns and the region have different names." So begins this deeply personal memoir of a young woman's life irrevocably changed by Germany's declaration of war. Gerda was only 17 when she was drafted into Nazi Germany's civilian labor corps. She vividly describes her experiences as a land girl, plane spotter, prisoner of war, refugee and American war bride.
Download or read book World Literature Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Crowns Crosses and Stars written by Sybil von Sell Niemöller and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of a remarkable life and a journey, from the privileged world of Prussian aristocracy, through the horrors of World War II, to high society in the television age of postwar America. It is also an account of a spiritual voyage, from a conventional Christian upbringing, through marriage to Pastor Martin Niemoeller, to conversion to Judaism. Born during the turbulent days of the Weimar Republic, the author was the goddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II (to whom her father was financial advisor). During her teenage years, she witnessed the rise of the Third Reich and her family's resistance to it, culminating in their involvement in "Operation Valkyrie," the ill-fated attempt to assassinate Hitler and form a new government. At war's end, she worked with British Intelligence to uncover Nazis leaders. Keeping a promise to her father, she left Germany for a new life in the United States in the 1950s, working for NBC and raising her son in the exciting world of New York, only to return to Germany as the wife of Martin Niemoeller, the voice of religious resistance during the Third Reich and of German guilt and conscience in the postwar decades. Upon her husband's death in 1984 she returned to America, after having converted to Judaism in London, and turned yet another page by becoming an active public speaker and author. The title reflects a story of three parts: "Crowns," the world of nobility in which the author was raised; "Crosses," her life with Martin Niemoeller and his battles with the Third Reich; and "Stars," the spiritual journey that brought her to Judaism.
Download or read book Requiem for a German Past written by Jurgen Herbst and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jurgen Herbst s account of growing up in Nazi Germany from 1928 to 1948 is a boy s experience of anti-Semitism and militarism from the inside. Herbst was a middle-class boy in a Lutheran family that saw value in Prussian military ideals and a mythic German past. His memoir is a compelling, understated tale of moral awakening.
Download or read book Seeing Like a State written by James C. Scott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Download or read book For Your Own Good written by Alice Miller and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term affects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions—on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler—offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world—indeed, of the ever-more-violent world—that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents readers with useful solutions in this regard—namely, to resensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.
Download or read book Donkey Galloping Out of Hell The Jack Hildebrandt Story written by Jack Hildebrandt and published by . This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donkey Galloping Out of Hell - The Jack Hildebrandt Story is a remarkable portrait of the fighting attitude of a long-gone era. Told from the perspective of the enemy, Luftwaffe bomber/fighter pilot Jack Hildebrandt's amazing story is startlingly vivid, horrifying, and compelling. From his affluent, yet tragic childhood during the rise of the terrifying Nazi Party, to the embattled skies along the Russian Front and Western Europe and the shedding of his own blood, to talking his way out of a prisoner-of-war camp in American English after he was captured by the Americans, to achieving his childhood dream of coming to America and becoming an American citizen, Jack's remarkable, disarming candor concerning his duty toward defending his country - both birth and adopted - will rattle your conscience.
Download or read book When We Cease to Understand the World written by Benjamin Labatut and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Download or read book In the Shadow of Wolves written by Alvydas Šlepikas and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Book of the Year, 2019 THE SECOND WORLD WAR IS OVER. BUT THE WORLD IS FAR FROM SAFE. As victorious Russian troops sweep across East Prussia, a group of desperate children face a new battle. Confronted by critical food shortages and the onset of a bitterly cold winter, these 'wolf children' secretly cross the border into Lithuania in search of work or food to take back to their starving families. In a world still reeling from the devastation of war, the children must risk everything to survive. In the Shadow of Wolves is a story of resilience, devastation and, ultimately, hope. Based on meticulous research, Alvydas Šlepikas's stunningly powerful debut novel has won over readers and critics across the world.
