"Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian feminist Eve Adams, and her long-lost book Lesbian Love. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912, took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. Adams's bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her. Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist. Carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams, and the publisher reprints the long-lost text of Adams's rare, unique book Lesbian Love."--Publisher's website.

Set against the panorama of the S.S. hunt for Jews, five concentration camps, and the Sachsenhausen death march, the author reveals his story of courage, sacrifice, love, and survival during the Holocaust

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust--or provide a more moving portrait of courage--than Oswald Rufeisen's. A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story. A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Tec vividly describes how Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve as translator and personal secretary to the German in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties--reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler--he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "aktions" and to sabatoge Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of doomed Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit. After the war, Father Daniel (as he is now known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as a Christian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. Today he continues to devote himself to bridging the gap between Christians and Jews. In the Lion's Den offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

"The first middle-grade book from a picture book master-a harrowing, heartrending, illustrated account of his childhood escape from the terrors of war"--

“He is our Dante . . . writing a modern masterpiece about his journey into Hell . . . [that is] unique in the literature of the Holocaust.” — USA Today A Penguin Classic Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century: a man who survived one of the ugliest times in history, yet who was able to describe his own Auschwitz experience with an unaffected tenderness. Levi was a master storyteller but he did not write fairytales. These stories are an elegy to the human figures who stood out against the tragic background of Auschwitz, “the ones in whom I had recognized the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue.” Each centers on an individual who—whether it be through a juggling trick, a slice of apple or a letter—discovers one of the “bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

"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.

Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record—in both words and images—of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world—we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic. This moving collaboration—a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation—is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town. Copub: The Judah L. Magnes Museum

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.

A detailed biography of Janusz Korczak (1878-1942) - doctor, teacher, writer and educational theorist - who was deported along with the children of his orphanage in August 1942 from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, where they perished.

Memoirs of Wilo (Wolf) Ungar, a Jew born in 1913 in Krasne, near Tarnopol. In September 1939 he was drafted into the Polish Army; notes the anti-Jewish mood of Poles after the Polish defeat. He fled to Lvov, where the Nazi invasion caught up with him in July 1941. Describes Nazi measures against the Jews and life in the ghetto. Ungar's wife and newly-born child perished during the Nazi "action" in June 1942. He lived on "Aryan papers" in the vicinity of Lvov and later fled to Warsaw. From there he moved to Nowy Dwór, northwest of Warsaw, and before March 1943 was interned in the ghetto there. He fled and returned to Lvov. Having been exposed as a Jew, he narrowly escaped being sent to the Janowska camp; he was hidden by a Ukrainian woman until the liberation. He tried to enlist in the Polish army in Lvov in 1944, but was rejected as a Jew. After the war he emigrated to the USA.

"This annotated edition of Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's postwar memoir follows her life as an investigative journalist during the emergence and deterioration of the communist state in Poland. Once a devoted communist herself, Nomberg-Przytyk recounts how antisemitism and government corruption shattered her illusions"--

This memoir, written as fiction, but based on fact, describes the fear-filled efforts of a pair of Polish adolescents, brother and sister, to survive in secrecy and constant anxiety in Lvov at a time when Jews were being rounded up and sent to the Ghetto - or worse. They have only their false identity papers, their few trusted contacts and their own wits to help them conceal their Jewish background and keep one step ahead of the German authorities. Miriam Akavia, who experienced at first hand similar terrors and anxieties, skillfully conveys the fluctuations in mood from the natural optimism and high spirits of youth to the painfully learned caution and dissembling forced upon them by their situation.

Written after the independent weekly paper that employed the author was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin's death--this work is an account of daily life in communist Poland