74 results for "Biography"

The choice: Poland, 1939-1945

Eber, Irene
Memoirs of a Jew born in 1927 in Halle. In 1938, together with other Jews of Polish origin, she and her family were deported to Poland; they settled in Mielec. Describes the Nazi occupation and the establishment of a ghetto. In March 1942 most of the ghetto's inhabitants were transferred to other ghettos or concentration camps. Eber and her family were sent to the Dębica ghetto, but she soon escaped. She found shelter with a Polish family, and hid in a chicken coop for almost two years. Her father was shot in a labor camp. After the war Eber discovered that her mother and sister had been saved by Oskar Schindler. In 1948, after living in a DP camp in Germany, Eber emigrated to the USA.
Schocken Books 2004 229 pages

Two roads home: Hitler, Stalin, and the miraculous survival of my family

Finkelstein, Daniel
"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"--
Doubleday 2023 374 pages

What time and sadness spared: mother and son confront the Holocaust

Ben-Atar, Roma Nutkiewicz,Ben-Atar, Doron S.
Roma Ben-Atar resisted until late in life the urging of her family to share the memories of her Nazi-era experiences. The Holocaust exerted a dark pressure on all of their lives but was never openly discussed. It was only when her granddaughter insisted on hearing the whole truth, with a directness partly generational, that Mrs. Ben-Atar agreed to tell her story. What Time and Sadness Spared is a journey of both loss and endurance, moving with shocking speed from a carefree adolescence in upper-middle-class Warsaw to the horrors of the Final Solution. The young girl sees her neighborhood transformed into a ghetto populated by skeletal figures both alive and dead. Unbelievably, things only grow worse as this ruin gives way to the death factories of Majdanek and Auschwitz and the death marches of 1945. Life in the camps changes her in less than a day, as if "the person in my body was a stranger I had never met." Her only consolation is to lie on her wooden bunk, no mattress, and speak to the soul of her mother, who, like virtually her entire family, had already been swept away. Roma must summon astonishing powers of adaptation simply to survive, bringing her finally through the wreckage of postwar Europe and to an entirely new life in Israel. In this unique family collaboration Roma Ben-Atar's son Doron, a historian who brings with him fluency in psychoanalysis, contributes through his commentary an awareness of the difficulties presented by historical narrative and memory. A visitor to the much-changed sites in which his mother grew up and was interned by the Nazis, he also voices the perspective of the survivors' children and their ambivalence over being "protected" from this past. As the generation that endured the camps passes from this world, What Time and Sadness Spared illustrates with particular urgency the historical responsibilities of the survivors' descendants, who must become the new vessels for a story that will not remain alive on its own but demands our courage and curiosity.
University of Virginia Press 2018-07-05 196 pages

The diary of Rywka Lipszyc: found in Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945 and first published in San Francisco in 2014

Lipszyc, Rywka
"Here is the extraordinary Diary of Rywka Lipszyc, finally published 70 years after it was created. Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, this remarkable diary depicts the nightmare of life under the Nazis in Poland's infamous Lodz ghetto--through the eyes of brilliant, 14-year-old Jewish girl"--Dust jacket flap.
Jewish Family and Children's Services Holocaust Center 2014 172 pages

The Holocaust odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando

Fromer, Rebecca
A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners In The Holocaust Odyssey , Rebecca Fromer leads us through the experiences of Danny Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship whose forced labor as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz included the disentangling of hundreds of thousands of gassed men, women, and children. The book is the result of a diligent collaboration. As it unfolds, it becomes a poignant reminder of the manner in which enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners. It is a story of human decency, the spark of which remains against all odds.
University of Alabama 1993 151 pages

From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall

Filar, Marian
Memoirs of Filar, a Jewish pianist born in Warsaw in 1917. Describes his youth as a child prodigy, including his early successes despite anti-Jewish discrimination. Pp. 50-115 relate his experiences in the Holocaust. At the outbreak of the war he fled to Lvov, but he returned to Warsaw after the German occupation in 1941. He entered the ghetto, where he first played with the Jewish symphony orchestra, but was soon sent for forced labor. When his parents and several of his six siblings were deported, he and his brother Joel joined a resistance group. They fought during the uprising, but were then caught and deported, first to Majdanek and then to Skarżysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald, and Schlieben. After surviving a death march, they were liberated at Nixdorf. His parents and two siblings perished in the Holocaust. After the war Filar lived in Germany; in 1950 he emigrated to the U.S., where he became a concert pianist and played in Carnegie Hall in 1952.
University Press of Mississippi 2002-02-20 231 pages

Quest: an autobiography

Infeld, Leopold
Leopold Infeld was one of the nine eminent scientists who, together with Albert Einstein, signed Bertrand Russell's famous letter warning that in this nuclear age, only a ban on war itself could save this planet (July, 1955). Infeld was born in the Jewish ghetto of Cracow, Poland in 1898, and this autobiography contains a vivid description of this long-since-vanished world. He was assistant to and then a scientific collaborator with Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1936-1938), and this collaboration continued for twelve years while Infeld was at the University of Toronto. In 1938 he wrote a book together with Albert Einstein that became a number one bestseller, The Evolution of Physics. Infeld was lecturer and then Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Toronto from 1938--1950. From 1945-1950 he gave many lectures all over Canada on the elementary physics of the atom bomb, warning that Russia would soon have the bomb and urging that the short period
AMS Chelsea Publishing 2006 361 pages

With balls and chutzpah: a story of survival

Gutowski, Gene
"Gene Gutowski's name is associated with some of the great films of the twentieth century: the Oscar-winning masterpiece The Pianist, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, and Fearless Vampire Killers. Producer of many of Roman Polanski's classics, Gene Gutowski shares here his extraordinary memoirs: those of a Polish Jew, alone in occupied Warsaw after the deportation of his entire family. As a young man who, with the blind courage of one who has nothing to lose, took incredible risks, he narrowly escaped the many horrors of life in Nazi-occupied Poland. In an extraordinary twist of destiny, and thanks to his prodigious resourcefulness, Gene Gutowski found himself in Germany in 1945, working as an American counter-espionage agent. After the war, he made his way to New York, where he worked as a fashion illustrator and TV producer, then on to London, where he became a successful producer and member of the jet set during the sixties. Finally, he achieved Hollywood consecration with the three Oscars won by The Pianist. It is an extremely endearing personality that reveals itself here, modest about the difficulties overcome, honest about the successes and failures. Gene Gutowski's youth was a thumb of the nose to death and totalitarianism, and his journey is a formidable life lesson"--back cover.
Iuniverse Inc 2011 324 pages

Rather die fighting: a memoir of World War II

Blaichman, Frank
"Frank Blaichman was sixteen years old when German forces invaded Poland. He saw his friends and neighbors conscripted to work as slave laborers. His uncle was taken outside his home and shot for preparing kosher meat; a few weeks later, one of his cousins was shot in her bed. When the roundups and deportations came, Blaichman knew he would not go quietly." "He set off for a nearby forest to find the underground bunkers of Jews who had already escaped. Together they formed a Jewish partisan force dedicated to fighting the Germans and anyone who collaborated with them, while hiding and sheltering those who were unable to take up arms. Death stalked the lives of these brave soldiers without an army - but they knew they would rather die fighting than surrender. As their numbers grew, they took up arms alongside Polish partisan units, and in 1944, they faced their greatest test: well-armed and well-rested German army battalions and air force units sent to destroy them." "Rather Die Fighting is the inspirational memoir of a man who dared to stand up to the Nazis against all odds. It is a saga of courage, sacrifice, and honor - and a fitting tribute to those who fought shoulder to shoulder to protect their families and homeland in World War II." --Book Jacket.
Arcade 2009 210 pages

A musician divided: André Tchaikowsky in his own words

Tchaikowsky, André
The Polish-born, British-based pianist André Tchaikowsky (1935-82) saw himself principally as a composer- one of several conflicting elements in his personality, charted by the diaries he kept between 1974 and 1982. André Tchaikowsky was only 46 when he died, internationally renowned as a pianist - and he made the headlines after his death when he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in performances of Hamlet. Yet for all his facility at the keyboard Tchaikowsky's real passion was composition. The internal conflict between pianist and composer compounded an already complex character. A Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, Tchaikowsky was also a homosexual. The diaries he kept between 1974 and his death chronicle the struggles that ran through his life. Debt kept driving him back to the concert platform when his true wish was to find the time to compose. His spirited writing details the joys and vicissitudes of his life with striking candour. The diaries are introduced and annotated by Anastasia Belina-Johnson, who also provides a chronology of Tchaikowsky's life and a survey of his music. Includes a CDof the pianist in recital. Anastasia Belina-Johnson is Head of Classical Music at the Leeds College of Music.
Toccata Press 2013 434 pages

East of time

Rosenberg, Yaakov ben Gershon
EAST OF TIME is a rendezvous of history and imagination, of realities and dreams, hopes and disenchantments. This extraordinary book, by turns stark and poetic, unfolds in a succession of short reminiscences that weave together into a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years of the author's childhood, when he witnessed the grand belief in a just new world overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s, imprisoned between the walls of ghettos, and finally silenced at Auschwitz. The book's touchstone is the determination of an entire community to remain human, even at the last frontier of life.
Brandl & Schlesinger 2005 220 pages

My animated life: the story of how I survived the German occupation to become Australia's legendary animation filmmaker

Gross, Yoram
Yoram Gross' recollections of his life, told simply and directly, cannot be read without emotion. This is the story of a youth who was forced to grow up during the Nazi occupation of his country, Poland. The book also recounts his life in Australia as an animator of such film classics as "Blinky Bill" and "Dot and the Kangaroo."
Brandl & Schlesinger 2011 227 pages

Sunrise west

Rosenberg, Yaakov ben Gershon
Navigating between the two worlds of wartime experiences in Europe and new life in Australia, this moving memoir of & a Holocaust & survivor is & imbued with an element of fiction. This deeply personal narrative travels from darkness to hope as the author loses his family at Auschwitz, spends the war in concentration camps, and ultimately emigrates to Australia with his wife, leading to an eventual restoration that remains colored by a tragic past.
Brandl & Schlesinger 2007 194 pages

A woman wanders through life and science

Koprowska, Irena
Irena Koprowska's autobiography illuminates the struggles of a young immigrant woman to combine family responsibilities and a demanding medical career. Irena Koprowska's autobiography chronicles the life and struggles of an immigrant woman who successfully pursued a career while raising a family. In the process, she became an award-winning physician, professor, and research pioneer at a time in history when it was believed a woman's place was in the home. Born in Warsaw in 1917, Irena Koprowska was married, pregnant, and a physician by the age of twenty-two. Forced to flee the Nazis, first in Poland and then in France, she fled to Brazil in 1940. Four years later she immigrated to the United States. Unable to speak English, she started her academic career as a volunteer at the Department of Pathology at Cornell University Medical College. During the years of her subsequent Research Fellowships at Cornell University Medical College, she worked with George N. Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear. The two co-authored a case report of the earliest diagnosis of lung cancer by a sputum smear. Eight years later, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Pathology at State University of New York Downstate Medical College and went on to become the first woman physician to become a full professor at Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital (now known as Hahnemann University) in Philadelphia. Later she joined the faculty of Temple University Medical School where, upon her retirement in 1987, she became Professor Emerita. She was recognized as "Woman Physician of the Year" by a Gold Medicus award of the Polish American Society in 1977 and received the Papanicolaou Award of the AmericanSociety of Cytology in 1985.
State University of New York Press 1997-01-01 306 pages

A partisan's memoir: woman of the Holocaust

Schulman, Faye
Memoirs of a Jew (b. Faye Lazebnik) from Lenin, Poland (now Belarus), who survived the Nazi occupation in this region, on the Polish-Soviet border. On 14 August 1942 the ghetto of Lenin was liquidated by the Nazis; the author was spared as a "specialist" (a photographer). In September 1942 she joined Soviet partisans in the Molotov brigade and served there as a photographer, nurse, and soldier. Relates the experiences of Jewish fighters amongst the Soviet partisans. Antisemitism existed among some partisans, and sometimes it cost Jews their lives. In July 1944 the area in which she fought was liberated by Soviet troops. In 1945 she returned to Poland, and in 1948 emigrated to Canada.
Second Story Press 1995 224 pages