Download or read book The Viennese Girl written by Jenny Lecoat and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the true story of a young Jewish girl - Hedy Bercu - who fled to Jersey from Vienna only to find herself trapped on the island during the German occupation. In June 1940, the horror-struck inhabitants of Jersey watch as the German army unopposed takes possession of their island. Now only a short way from the English coast, the Germans plan their invasion. Hedy Bercu, a young Jewish girl from Vienna who fled to the isolation and safety of Jersey two years earlier to escape the Nazis, finds herself once more trapped, but this time with no way of escape. Hiding her racial status, Hedy is employed by the German authorities and secretly embarks on small acts of resistance. But most dangerously of all, she falls in love with German lieutenant Kurt Neumann -- a relationship on which her life will soon depend. A remarkable novel of finding hope and love when all seems at its darkest.
Download or read book The Viennese Girl written by Jenny Lecoat and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the true story of a young Jewish girl - Hedy Bercu - who fled to Jersey from Vienna only to find herself trapped on the island during the German occupation.
Download or read book The Girl From the Channel Islands written by Jenny Lecoat and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a remarkable true story of love and survival. In June 1940, the Channel Islands are occupied by Hitler's forces. Hedy Bercu, a young woman who fled from Vienna to Jersey to escape the Occupation, finds herself once more entrapped by the Nazis, this time with no escape. Concealing her Jewish status, she finds translation work with the German authorities and embarks on secret acts of resistance. Most extraordinary of all, Hedy falls in love with a German lieutenant – a relationship on which her survival comes to depend. 'Combines historical fact with the fictional narrative, and offers a cast rich with multidimensional characters. Readers will be riveted' – Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Vienna Nocturne written by Vivien Shotwell and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shotwell lyrically navigates her protagonist through love affairs, heartache and dazzling high-stakes performances. This is an exquisite read for history fans, classical-music lovers and romance aficionados alike." --Chatelaine Vienna Nocturne recounts the turbulent life and brilliantly successful career of young British opera singer Anna Storace, a child prodigy who is taken by her parents to Italy at age thirteen to advance her career. In love with life and wildly ambitious, Anna wants everything--to be famous, to be loved--and this leads her to make some fatal choices. We watch her turn from a carefree young girl to a passionate young woman, and it is during this transformation that her affair with Mozart blossoms. The story of their love, no less powerful for being forbidden, is reminiscent of the passionate thwarted romances described in Loving Frank and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Written in melodious prose by a young author studying opera at Yale, Vienna Nocturne is dramatic story of a woman's battle to find love and fame in an 18th-century world that controls and limits her at every turn.
Download or read book Some Girls Some Hats and Hitler written by Trudi Kanter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “ FOR EVEN IN NAZI VIENNA, Trudi realized, women still looked in the mirror. . . . She knows that even in the bleak darkness, we feel, love, desire. She left no child (she and Walter tried, with no success); her hats are long lost, but her book is her legacy, discovered once again.” —From the introduction by Linda Grant, a uthor of The Clothes on Their Backs, The Thoughtful Dresser and We Had It So Good In 1938 Trudi Kanter, stunningly beautiful, chic and charismatic, was a hat designer for the best-dressed women in Vienna. She frequented the most elegant cafés. She had suitors. She flew to Paris to see the latest fashions. And she fell deeply in love with Walter Ehrlich, a charming and romantic businessman. But as Hitler’s tanks rolled into Austria, the world this young Jewish couple knew collapsed, leaving them desperate to escape. In prose that cuts straight to the bone, Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler tells the true story of Trudi’s astonishing journey from Vienna to Prague to blitzed London seeking safety for her and Walter amid the horror engulfing Europe. It was her courage, resourcefulness and perseverance that kept both her and her beloved safe during the Nazi invasion and that make this an indelible memoir of love and survival. Sifting through a secondhand bookshop in London, an English editor stumbled upon this extraordinary book, and now, though she died in 1992, the world has a second chance to discover Trudi Kanter’s enchanting story. In these pages she is alive—vivid, tenacious and absolutely unforgettable.
Download or read book The Lady in Gold written by Anne-Marie O'Connor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller The true story that inspired the movie Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds. Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece—the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor. Winner of the Marfield National Award for Arts Writing. Winner of a California Book Award.
Download or read book Paper Love written by Sarah Wildman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Europe, and an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory. Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled “Correspondence: Patients A–G.” What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood out: those from Valy—Valerie Scheftel. Her grandfather’s lover who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria. Valy’s name wasn’t unknown to her—Wildman had once asked her grandmother about a dark-haired young woman whose images she found in an old photo album. “She was your grandfather’s true love,” her grandmother said at the time, and refused any other questions. But now, with the help of the letters, Wildman started to piece together Valy’s story. They revealed a woman desperate to escape and clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom. Obsessed with Valy’s story, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. She discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman. On in the course of discovering Valy’s ultimate fate, she was forced to reexamine the story of her grandfather’s triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and in the process, she rescues a life seemingly lost to history.
Download or read book The Female Secession written by Megan Brandow-Faller and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the work of artists trained at the Viennese Women's Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explores generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies on art, craft, and design.
Download or read book A Nervous Splendor written by Frederic Morton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1980-10-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Award Finalist A "riveting" (New York Times) look at one year of Viennese life during the twilight of an empire On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still. Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.
Download or read book Hedy s Folly written by Richard Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible. Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedy's Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system." Along the way Rhodes weaves together Hollywood’s golden era, the history of Vienna, 1920s Paris, weapons design, music, a tutorial on patent law and a brief treatise on transmission technology. Narrated with the rigor and charisma we've come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radio's genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.
Download or read book Who Is Martha written by Marjana Gaponenko and published by New Vessel Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Vividly drawn characters, history, music, birds, love, loneliness, and wisdom . . . A brilliant book, rich and satisfying as a Viennese torte” (Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology). In this poignant yet rollicking novel, ninety-six-year-old ornithologist Luka Levadski forgoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Martha—the last of the now-extinct passenger pigeons—died. Levadski too has an acute sense of being the last of a species. He may have devoted much of his existence to studying birds, but now he befriends a hotel butler and another elderly guest, who also doesn’t have much time left, to share in the lively escapades of his final days. This gloriously written tale is “a book like a fantastic party, as unshakeable as a child’s faith [that] astonishes to the very end” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung).
Download or read book I Belong to Vienna written by Anna Goldenberg and published by New Vessel Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of family history, personal identity, and WWII Vienna—a “well-researched, intimate, evocative look at some of the 20th century’s foulest days” (Kirkus). In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg’s great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing room tickets to the Vienna State Opera. He never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique story in magnificent reportage. She also portrays Vienna’s undying allure. Although they tried living in the United States after World War Two, both grandparents eventually returned to the Austrian capital. The author, too, has returned to her native Vienna after living in New York herself, and her fierce attachment to her birthplace enlivens her engrossing biographical history. I Belong to Vienna is a probing tale of heroism and resilience marked by a surprising freshness as a new generation comes to terms with history’s darkest era.
Download or read book The Spies of Shilling Lane written by Jennifer Ryan and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir comes a thrilling new WWII story about a village busybody—the mighty Mrs. Braithwaite—who resolves to find, and then rescue, her missing daughter Mrs. Braithwaite, self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed following her husband’s selfish divorce petition. Never deterred, the threat of a family secret being revealed sets her hot-foot to London to find the only person she has left—her clever daughter Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty’s landlord, the timid Mr. Norris, informs her that Betty hasn’t been home in days--with the chaos of the bombs, there’s no telling what might have befallen her. Aghast, Mrs. Braithwaite sets her bullish determination to the task of finding her only daughter. Storming into the London Blitz, Mrs. Braithwaite drags the reluctant Mr. Norris along as an unwitting sidekick as they piece together Betty’s unexpectedly chaotic life. As she is thrown into the midst of danger and death, Mrs. Braithwaite is forced to rethink her old-fashioned notions of status, class, and reputation, and to reconsider the question that’s been puzzling her since her world overturned: How do you measure the success of your life? Readers will be charmed by the unforgettable Mrs. Braithwaite and her plucky, ruthless optimism, and find in The Spies of Shilling Lane a novel with surprising twists and turns, quiet humor, and a poignant examination of mothers and daughters and the secrets we keep.
Download or read book Rose written by Gary E. Vawter and published by . This book was released on 2017-02-11 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight-year-old Rose had everything a girl needed growing up in Vienna, Austria before World War II. She was christened as Rose Edith Irene Frances Brezcina, after several Catholic Saints and, although she did not know it then, she would need all of the divine intervention she could get in the years that followed. She and her extended family lived peaceful ordinary lives in a typical working class Viennese neighborhood, but there was nothing ordinary or typical about Rose. She possessed a spiritual awareness beyond her years, and she brought a spirit of confidence and joy into every situation. Whether she was sitting with her grandmother who was dying of colon cancer, and trying not to gag from the stench of the colostomy bag, or enjoying a fun-filled summer in the Austrian countryside with her cousins on her aunt and uncle's farm, Rose lived her life with a deep sense of faith and purpose that would serve her well in the days ahead. Her faith would soon be tested, though, as the Nazi army moved into Austria in 1938 and war came to her city. Before she would even reach her teens, Rose would be among top gymnasts selected to perform for Hitler and, afterwards shake his hand and receive his personal congratulations; she would witness her best friend, Marta, a Jew, seized from her classroom by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp, never to be seen or heard from again; she would willingly accept her uncle's invitation to join him in an underground effort to hide Jews, by providing him food that she managed to sneak from her mother's pantry; and, as a result of her efforts, she would suffer painful torture on two separate occasions by Gestapo and SS soldiers who were determined to force her to reveal the whereabouts of her uncle and his underground activities. But, despite their torture, she did not betray her uncle's trust. As if that was not enough, Rose experienced the death of her only sibling, her three-year-old brother, in an air raid bombing. In th
Download or read book The Only Woman in the Room written by Marie Benedict and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE USA TODAY BESTSELLER Bestselling author Marie Benedict reveals the story of a brilliant woman scientist only remembered for her beauty. Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side and understood more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star. But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis and revolutionize modern communication...if anyone would listen to her. A powerful book based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece that celebrates the many women in science that history has overlooked. Other Bestselling Historical Fiction from Marie Benedict: The Mystery of Mrs. Christie Lady Clementine Carnegie's Maid The Other Einstein
Download or read book Eva and Eve written by Julie Metz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julie Metz's unforgettable account of her late mother's childhood in Nazi-occupied Austria and the parallels she sees in present-day America.
Download or read book Caging Skies written by Christine Leunens and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the major film Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi An avid member of the Hitler Youth in 1940s Vienna, Johannes Betzler discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa behind a false wall in their home. His initial horror turns to interest—then love and obsession. After his parents disappear, Johannes is the only one aware of Elsa’s existence in the house and he alone is responsible for her fate. Drawing strength from his daydreams about Hitler, Johannes plans for the end of the war and what it might mean for him and Elsa. The inspiration for the major film Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi, Caging Skies, sold in over twenty countries, is a work of rare power; a stylistic and storytelling triumph. Startling, blackly comic, and written in Christine Leunens’s gorgeous, muscular prose, this novel, her U.S. debut, is singular and unforgettable.
