38 results for "Memoir"

Resisting the Holocaust: upstanders, partisans, and survivors

Bartrop, Paul R.
This book enables readers to learn about upstanders, partisans, and survivors from first-hand perspectives that reveal the many forms of resistance-some bold and defiant, some subtle-to the Nazis during the Holocaust. What did those who resisted the Nazis during the 1930s through 1945-known now as "the Righteous"-do when confronted with the Holocaust? How did those who resorted to physical acts of resistance to fight the Nazis in the ghettos, the concentration camps, and the forests summon the courage to form underground groups and organize their efforts? This book presents a comprehensive examination of more than 150 remarkable people who said "no" to the Nazis when confronted by the Holocaust of the Jews. They range from people who undertook armed resistance to individuals who risked-and sometimes lost-their lives in trying to rescue Jews or spirit them away to safety. In many cases, the very act of survival in the face of extreme circumstances was a form of resistance. This important book explores the many facets of resistance to the Holocaust that took place less than 100 years ago, providing valuable insights to any reader seeking evidence of how individuals can remain committed to the maintenance of humanitarian traditions in the darkest of times.
Bloomsbury Academic 2024-01-25 480 pages

Munich 1919: diary of a revolution

Klemperer, Victor
Munich 1919 is a vivid portrayal of the chaos that followed World War I and the collapse of the Munich Council Republic by one of the most perceptive chroniclers of German history. Victor Klemperer provides a moving and thrilling account of what turned out to be a decisive turning point in the fate of a nation, for the revolution of 1918-9 not only produced the first German democracy, it also heralded the horrors to come. With the directness of an educated and independent young man, Klemperer turned his hand to political journalism, writing astute, clever and linguistically brilliant reports in the beleaguered Munich of 1919. He sketched intimate portraits of the people of the hour, including Erich Mühsam, Max Levien and Kurt Eisner, and took the measure of the events around him with a keen eye. These observations are made ever more poignant by the inclusion of passages from his later memoirs. In the midst of increasing persecution under the Nazis he reflected on the fateful year 1919, the growing threat of antisemitism, and the acquaintances he made in the period, some of whom would later abandon him, while others remained loyal. Klemperer's account once again reveals him to be a fearless and deeply humane recorder of German history. Munich 1919 will be essential reading for all those interested in 20th century history, constituting a unique witness to events of the period.
Polity Press 2022-09-06 224 pages

Witnesses of war: children's lives under the Nazis

Stargardt, Nicholas
Examines what life was like for children - German, Polish, and Jewish - under Nazi rule, based mainly on the diaries and memoirs of 14 persons, five of them Jews: Yehuda Bacon, Janina Dawidowicz (Janina David), Thomas Geve, Dawid Sierakowiak, Miriam Wattenberg (Mary Berg). Pt. 2 (pp. 103-227), "The Race War", focuses on the experiences of the Jewish children, especially in the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw, and includes the experiences of Bacon in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Provides examples of how the games of all these children reflected life and death around them.
Pimlico 2006 509 pages

Letters From the Kaiser to the Czar

Isaac Don Levine,German Emperor William
This collection of letters from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Emperor Nicholas II of Russia illuminates a crucial period in European history. From the pre-war tensions that ultimately led to World War I to the personal relationship between the two powerful monarchs, this volume provides a fascinating look into the minds of two of Europe's most important leaders. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2023-07-18 320 pages

The Jewish women prisoners of Ravensbrück: who were they?

Buber Agassi, Judith
A study based on ca. 700 personal stories of Jewish survivors of Ravensbrück, including ca. 200 testimonies held in the Yad Vashem archives; information from memoirs; and interviews conducted with survivors after the war or during 1997-2005 by Agassi and the team of scholars from Israel and Germany who worked with her, as well as with relatives of survivors who are no longer alive. The percentage of Jews among Ravensbrück prisoners was small, thus this camp was sometimes neglected by scholars of the Holocaust. Divides the history of the Ravensbrück camp (1939-45) into five periods, and presents a sociological portrait of the Jewish population in each period. Gives the distribution of the Jewish prisoners by countries of origin, reasons for arrest and incarceration, age, marital status, etc. Dwells on the prisoners in the satellite camps, the evacuation marches in the last stage of the war, and the rescue of some of the prisoners by Count Bernadotte in February-March 1945. Notes manifestations of antisemitism on the part of some non-Jewish prisoners. There was little group-wide social organization among non-political Jewish prisoners in Ravensbrück, only small group relationships. Resistance was limited to small-scale sabotage at in work places. Nonetheless, the very survival in Ravensbrück constituted a type of heroism.
Texas Tech University Press 2014 334 pages

Empty Water: A Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto

Żywulska, Krystyna
Sonia Landau was born in 1914. During the German occupation in 1941 she was displaced together with her family to the Warsaw Ghetto where she endured two tormented years. She eventually escaped the Ghetto and became active in the Resistance movement, later assuming the name Krystyna Zywulska. In 1943 she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Zywulska wrote “Empty Water” twenty years after completing her first memoir “I Survived Auschwitz”. Aware that people still did not understand much of what had taken place in the Ghetto and Resistance, she decided to voice her experience once again, revealing the crime, contempt and shame she encountered. She penned one of the most distinctly balanced accounts of the time—describing good and bad, purity and depravity in Germans, Poles and Jews. She also demonstrated how, under horrible conditions, the definition of good and bad becomes relative. Each day, trying to maintain the pretence of normality despite inhuman conditions, Sonia’s mother put a pot on the stove, although she had no food to cook. She boiled just plain water and served it to her family, enough to cheat their hunger and repel and deceive the ubiquitous fear. Zywulska’s experiences during those two years in the Ghetto can enlighten us all. Her account tells of her daring escape from the Ghetto and brave participation in the Polish Resistance. Empty Water takes place during the horror of Hitler’s crematoria but provides layers of nuances that make it difficult to fall into the trap of easy judgments of good and evil. Zywulska emerges from her experiences convinced that human life is the greatest treasure of all. This book is testament to her belief.
Independently published 2025-02-01 224 pages

Well-kept ruins

Cixous, Hélène
'In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.'--Publisher description.
Seagull Books 2022 147 pages

A European Past Memoirs, 1905-1945

Felix Gilbert
Felix Gilbert begins this book of memoirs by describing his peaceful and protected childhood in Germany before the First World War. That war, and the revolutionary events that followed it, strongly influenced his choice of profession; he studied history at Heidelberg, Munich, and the University of Berlin. He gives a firsthand account of the intellectually stimulating and politically restless atmosphere in 1920s Berlin. During the first six months of 1933, when the Nazi takeover occurred in Germany, Mr. Gilbert was at work in the archives in Italy. There he received letters from relations and friends in Germany; published here, these letters convey the impact of Nazism on the daily lives of these people. In other chapters of the book Mr. Gilbert, who served as a member of the OSS, vividly describes wartime London, liberated Paris, and occupied Germany. These memoirs end with an account of a mission to Berlin which, for Mr. Gilbert, was also a search for what remained of a world that once had been.
W. W. Norton 1988-02-18 240 pages

Voices in a Revolution: The Collapse of East German Communism

Lasky, Melvin J.
Afeatured article in Die Zeit, the leading German weekly, begins with "Melvin, du hast gewonnen"--Mel, you have won! In his extraordinary account of the final days of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) we see the reckoning of a regime, and also the vindication of a life-long devotee of European democracy. It is unlikely that any comparable memoir will be written, since Lasky's career spanned the entire history of wartime and postwar Germany, especially in divided and Wall-torn Berlin.Voices in a Revolution, now in paperback, offers an in-depth portrayal of the Communist police state before the breakdown, followed by a blow-by-blow account of the drama of breakdown and regime transformation. Characters in the everyday cultural world of Germany come alive as harbingers and heralds of the end of the old and the necessity of the new.Lasky understands the role of accident as well as of necessity. The West Germans had all but abandoned the slogan of One People, One Nation when they were faced with the immense task of supervising just such a reintegration. The work ends with the awakening conscience at the very point that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This is a memorable work--one likely to sear the conscience of lovers of freedom and analysts of tyranny alike.
[distributor] Taylor & Francis, c/o Bookpoint 2017-10-30 124 pages

I remember the location-- exactly

Koch, Eric
Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1919 in Frankfurt to a wealthy family and renamed Otto after his father, who died young. First relates the stories of a number of Jews who contributed to German society; these accounts often end with brief details of deaths in concentration camps or by suicide. After the Koch family jewelry store was Aryanized, the extended family faced the dilemma of how and when to emigrate. In 1935 Otto went to study in England, returning home on holidays until 1938. Chs. 17-18 (pp. 91-103) are devoted to events of 1938, when his mother, who had returned to Frankfurt from Switzerland, succeeded in emigrating. Otto, who was studying at Cambridge, was arrested as an enemy alien by the British, interned, and then sent to Canada, where he and other Jews, along with Nazis and POWs, were imprisoned for over a year and a half. The policy of incarcerating Jews in Canada was not considered unreasonable by Koch and others. They attributed it to fear and obtuseness; antisemitism may have been a factor but not a major one. Koch gives a full account of the German Jews' incarceration in "Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder".
Mosaic Press 2006 188 pages

The Weimar triangle

Koch, Eric
This new novel extends Koch's achievements in his previous novels and takes the reader to Koch's native Germany. Set in Weimar and Frankfurt in Germany, in the pivotal years 1927 and 1928, the novel is triggered the International Music Exhibition of 1927 "The Summer of Music. The reader is introduced to three main characters: Hanni Geisel, an amateur musician and hostess of star-studded Saturday 'dejeuners'; her lover Erwin Herzberg, the editor of the culture sections of the Frankfurter Zeitung; and Hanni's husband, Dr. Hermann Geisel, a successful lawyer and art collector. They constitute the Weimar triangle of the title. Koch again uses a multi-format narrative technique so highly praised in the German reviews of Recollections, including stories, excerpts from imagined memoirs, invented diaries, letters and even a synopsis of a never-produced operetta about the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, Putsching with Putzi.
Mosaic Press 2010 198 pages

Ernst Toller: Justice: Experiences

Toller, Ernst
Ernst Toller’s Justice: Experiences builds upon and supplements his personal experiences in prison, and the arbitrariness and favoritism to certain parties of the Weimar Justice system that were described in his autobiography, A Youth in Germany, and his Letters from Prison. It includes personal stories of his treatment by the justice system and the prison authorities, as well as stories the harsh and unfair treatment of his fellow prisoner’s that are still experienced by inmates even today, a hundred years later. Ernst Toller (December 1, 1893 – May 22, 1939) was a German author, playwright, left-wing politician and revolutionary, known for his Expressionist plays. He served in 1919 for six days as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, after which he became the head of its army. He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the armed resistance by the Bavarian Soviet Republic to the central government in Berlin. While in prison, Toller wrote several plays that gained him international renown. They were performed in London and New York City as well as in Berlin and other places. In 1933, Toller was exiled from Germany after the Nazis came to power. He did a lecture tour in 1936–1937 in the United States and Canada, settling in California for a while before going to New York. He joined other exiles there. He died by suicide in May 1939.
Loch Raven Press, LLC. 2023-12-09 290 pages

Love in exile: an American writer's memoir of life in divided Berlin

Anderson, Edith
Edith Anderson left America for Berlin in 1947 to join her German husband - an exile from the Nazis - who had returned to his homeland to build a new country from Hitler's ruins. Max Schroeder had been a surrealist poet/playwright in his bohemian twenties, but when Edith Anderson met him in New York at the height of World War II, he was a seasoned, forty-three-year-old political activist editing an anti-facist periodical in English and German. Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls."
Steerforth Press 1999 404 pages

Englische Schauspieler und Englisches Schauspiel Zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutschland...

Emil Herz
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Boss 2013-12 174 pages

Analogies in physics and life: a scientific autobiography

Weiner, Richard M.
Analogies play a fundamental role in science. To understand how and why, at a given moment, a certain analogy was used, one has to know the specific, historical circumstances under which the new idea was developed. This historical background is never presented in scientific articles and quite rarely in books. For the general reader, the undergraduate or graduate student who learns the subject for the first time, but also for the practitioner who looks for inspiration or who wants to understand what his colleague working in another field does, these historical circumstances can be fascinating and useful. This book discusses a series of analogy effects in subatomic physics, the prediction and theory of which the author has contributed to in the last 50 years. These phenomena are presented at a level accessible to the non-specialist, without formulae but with emphasis on the personal and historical background: memoirs of meetings, discussions and correspondence with collaborators and colleagues. As such, besides its scientific aspects, the book constitutes an absorbing witness account of a holocaust survivor who subsequently illegally crossed the Iron Curtain to escape communist persecution.
World Scientific 2008 418 pages