Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author’s father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz—“the place,” writes Kofman, “where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted.” It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the Sorbonne. The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the German occupation. Not long after her father’s disappearance, Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This bold woman, whom Kofman called Mémé, undoubtedly saved the young girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman’s close attachment to Mémé also resulted in a rupture between mother and child that was never to be fully healed. This slender volume is distinguished by the author’s clear prose, the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.

A Holocaust survivor recounts her journey to her family's hometown of Šamorín, Slovakia, to exhume the bodies of her grandparents from a Jewish cemetery that would soon be flooded by a new dam on the Danube River, and take the bodies to Israel for reburial.

"In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless, and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille helping thousands of men and women, including many artists and intellectuals--among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst--escape the Nazis. With his German background, understanding of French culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry's refugee network as a spy and scout. The spry blond who looked even younger than his age flourished in the underground, handling counterfeit documents, secret passwords, black market currency, surveying escape routes, and dealing with avaricious gangsters. But when Fry was eventually forced to leave France, Gussie, as he was affectionately known, could not get out. For the next four years, Justus relied on his wits and skills to escape captivity, survive several close calls with death, and continue his fight against the Nazis, working with the French Resistance and later, becoming attached with the United States Army. At the war's end, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. Justus' story is a powerful saga of bravery, daring, adventure, and survival with the soul of a spy thriller. Reflecting on his past, Justus sees his life as a confluence of circumstances. As he writes, 'I survived the war through a rare combination of good fortune, resourcefulness, optimism, and, most important, the kindness of many good people.'" -- Publisher's description.

A family's story of human tenacity, faith and a race for survival in the face of unspeakable horror and cruelty perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jewish people. Growing up in the safety of Britain, Jonathan Wittenberg was deeply aware of his legacy as the child of refugees from Nazi Germany. Yet, like so many others there is much he failed to ask while those who could have answered his questions were still alive. After burying their aunt Steffi in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, Jonathan, now a rabbi, accompanies his cousin Michal as she begins to clear the flat in Jerusalem where the family have lived since fleeing Germany in the 1930s. Inside an old suitcase abandoned on the balcony they discover a linen bag containing a bundle of letters left untouched for decades. Jonathan's attention is immediately captivated as he tries to decipher the faded writing on the long-forgotten letters. They eventually draw him into a profound and challenging quest to uncover the painful details of his father's family's history. Through the wartime correspondence of his great-grandmother Regina and his grandmother, aunts and uncles, Jonathan weaves together the strands of an ancient rabbinical family with the history of Europe during the Second World War and the unfolding policies of the Nazis, telling the moving story of a family whose lives are as fragile as the paper on which they write, but whose faith in God remains steadfast.

[A] searing memoir. . . . An enduring, indeed universal, story. Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe Summoned with her mother to Gestapo headquarters in 1943, fourteen-year-old Cordelia Edvardson was given a terrible choice: to acknowledge her secret Jewish heritage and suffer the consequences or to see her mother charged with treason. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the true story of the love between this mother and daughter, and a piercing example of the tragedies wrought by Nazi Germany. "A lacerating, beautifully translated memoir." Publishers Weekly , starred review "Mesmerizing. . . . [Has] the concise unreality of a horrifying fairy tale." Thomas Frick, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Behind [Edvardson's] deceptively simple prose is a complex and tragic story." Judith Bolton-Fasman, Newsday "Cordelia Edvardson's defiant tone challenges us to eschew simplified encounters with the literature and experiences of Holocaust survivors." Paul H. Hamburg, Jewish Book World "To see the horrors of the Holocaust through a child's eye is to experience hell. Cordelia Edvardson's astonishing story captures, with a terrifying reality, a child's response to the myriad atrocities of the Nazis and their murderous regime. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is compelling, horrifying, poetic in its intensity." Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter

Zuzana Ruzickova's story stands as a remarkable testimony of Holocaust survival, as well as a joyful celebration of music and resistance.

Zusammenfassung: The stories of Albert Schatz, discoverer of streptomycin, and Inge Auerbacher, a concentration camp survivor whose life was saved by the drug.

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Epic, moving and important' ROBERT HARRIS 'A modern classic' OBSERVER 'An unforgettable epic of a book' DAILY MAIL From longstanding political columnist and co[Bokinfo]

Zdenka Fantlova's peaceful life was changed forever when she was sent to Terezin concentration camp. Here she was given a humble engraved tin ring by her first love Arno. When he gave her the ring he said, "That's for our engagement. And to keep you safe. If we are both alive when the war ends I will find you." Arno was sent East on a penal transport later that same day. Zdenka survived six concentration camps including Auschwitz, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen and Belsen - the worst of all - risking her life for the tin ring. In the last chaotic days of the war in Belsen she crawled to a Red Cross post. There she was saved by an unknown British soldier to whom the book is dedicated. A unique and incredible story of love, human endurance and will power.

A bestseller in Germany, Michael Wieck's account of his childhood in Königsberg recalls a German city obliterated by fire-bombing during the Second World War. As the child of a Jewish mother and Gentile father, Wieck was persecuted first as a "certified Jew" by the Nazis, then as a German by the Russian occupiers, including horrific internment in the Rothenstein concentration camp. His emigration to the West in 1948 marked the end of the 408-year history of the Jewish community in Königsberg. From the earliest delights of a childhood filled with music, family, and the smell of pines and the sea, Wieck retraces his life. He tells of his school days and their sudden end, the shock of Kristallnacht, his Aunt Fanny being sent by train to a destination unknown, the chemical factory where Jewish workers gradually disappeared, the bombs falling on Königsberg. The Russian occupation was anything but the expected delivery from the horrors of the war. In the midst of privation, savagery, and death, there were moments of absurdity, and Wieck powerfully depicts them in this unforgettable memoir.

"An epic and beautifully written World War II family history that spans Europe, telling of two happy families uprooted by war, their incredible suffering in Hitler's and Stalin's camps, and the near-miraculous survival and rescue of the author's parents who met after the war. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather Alfred Wiener was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they became close with Anne Frank's family. But they were eventually separated, and Daniel's mother Mirjam was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters while Alfred worked feverishly to free them. Finkelstein's father, Ludwik, grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Poland where his father was a patriotic hero of the Great War. But when Stalin took control, Finkelstein's grandfather was deported to Siberia, while Ludwik and his mother were sent to Kazahkstan, where they barely survived freezing winters and harrowing forced labor conditions. Love and Murder is a page-turning account of ingenuity, bravery and the almost unbelievable coincidences that brought Daniel's parents together. The story features secret archives, forgery and theft, and sweeps across Europe to show the expanse of the war. Moving, engrossing and inspiring, Love and Murder will profoundly touch all who read it"--

"Ben's story is unlike any you've every heard. Ben Fainer spent the entire war as a Nazi prisoner, surviving for six years in six different camps ... It is a moving and greatly inspirational story you'll never forget."; from back cover of book.

The award-winning novelist recounts his miraculous survival of the Holocaust, from a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp at the age of seven, his escape from the camp, his life in hiding in the Ukranian forests, his negotiation of several displaced persons' camps, his 1946 arrival in Palestine and his struggle to build a new life on the fragments of his past.

"A poignant, groundbreaking memoir that links the Holocaust and its aftermath to the safe haven that opened for camp survivors in Latin America at mid-century. The controversy surrounding the collaboration between Isacovici and Rodr guez remains an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the thorny path of Jewish-Hispanic relations worldwide."-Ilan Stavans"Distinguished by geography as well as by its painful testimony. . . . Much of the memoir's early drama involves the creeping Nazi threat opposing Jews' wishful thinking-that the war might be ending and that 'it can't happen here.' . . . The author's family is shattered in Birkenau, but he survives Auschwitz with jobs peeling potatoes and mining coal at Jaworno, and he survives a gruesome death march as the Soviets advance. Isacovici is able to rejoin two brothers in a fruitless return to the family farm and to many European cities in search of a haven. He then joins the family of a woman with whom he has a serious romance, who end up with visas for Ecuador, where he feels an empathy for the suffering of the local Indians. . . . This account tells an unforgettable and unique story."-Kirkus ReviewsSalomon Isacovici died in 1998. Dick Gerdes is a professor of Spanish at George Mason University. Man of Ashes was first published in Mexico in 1990 as A7393: Hombre de cenizas and was awarded the Fernando Jeno Prize.

Memoirs of Lantos, born to the Leipniker family in 1939 in Makó, Hungary. In 1944, after his older brother was taken away, the rest of the family was sent to the ghetto of Szeged, but the Jews there were soon deported. He and his parents were first sent to Strasshof in Austria for a short time, then to Wiener Neustadt and to Bergen-Belsen, where his father died. He and his mother were then sent on a death transport, during which they were liberated by American soldiers. They returned to Hungary and found that his brother had perished. Lantos later studied medicine in England, and in 1969 decided to remain there.

"The Jerusalem of the Balkans is today a city of ghosts. Saloniki or Salonika, as Thessaloniki was known its Jewish community, today barely numbers a thousand Jews whereas from 1500 to World War I the Jews constituted the majority of its inhabitants. Moshe Ha-Elyon and his extended family were part of the deportation from Salonika of some 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz where all but a handful were gassed, beaten, or starved to death during the spring of 1943 to the end of the war. This memoir differs from the many memoirs of Greek Jews. Moshe Ha- Elyon portrays the religious and cultural life of his ancestral community as well as the spiritual and mystical research of his father who predicted, prior to his death at the onset of the war, both the persecution of the Jews and the subsequent rise of a Jewish state in its aftermath. It is the moving story of a teenager who suffered in extremis yet lived to transmit to his family in Israel the legacy of a vanished era. A most informative and worthwhile insight into the inner world of Greek Jewry before and during its destruction during World War II"--