Gisella Perl's memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women's extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl's memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis' Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl's writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. One of the memoir's major historical contributions is Perl's account of being forced to work alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl's testimony on Holocaust memory and education.

"The life and mysterious death of Otto Wachter, former Governor of Nazi-occupied Poland, who died in the Vatican after World War II"--

Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Gestapo for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border.

A biography of Wiesenthal, based partly on interviews with him and with other persons. Wiesenthal was born in Buczacz in 1908. Ch. 4 (pp. 51-72) deals with the war years. Wiesenthal was interned in prison in Lvov, taken for forced labor, interned in the Lvov ghetto, and then in the Janowska camp. In 1943 he escaped, but he was caught in June 1944 and went through a number of camps, from Płaszów to Mauthausen, where he was liberated. The rest of the book deals with his postwar activities hunting down Nazi criminals. In 1947, Wiesenthal established the Historical Documentation Centre, first in Linz and then in Vienna. Wiesenthal ascribes to himself a key role in hunting down Eichmann, Stangl, and other Nazi criminals, which has led to quarrels with other Nazi hunters. However, it was Wiesenthal who persisted in the search for Eichmann in the late 1940s-50s. He also fought against the statute of limitation in Germany and Austria. During the Waldheim affair, Wiesenthal rejected the accusation that Waldheim was a war criminal, which aroused the ire of the World Jewish Congress. Despite many oddities in Wiesenthal's character, he always has been a man of conscience and a hero of our epoch.

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.

Contributors examine how the Nakba has shaped the personal and collective memory of Palestinians and how that memory impels their claims for justice.

An autobiography by Zuroff (born in 1948 in New York), focusing on his relentless search for Holocaust perpetrators, both Nazis and their local collaborators, mainly in Eastern Europe, who after World War II found refuge in the USA and other Western countries. In 1978 Zuroff began to work at the newly established Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and from 1979 he worked with the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, created to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in the USA. In the late 1980s he launched a campaign on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center to prosecute Nazi criminals and collaborators who had entered Australia, Canada, Britain, and other Western countries posing as refugees. In the course of his activities, Zuroff was confronted with the reluctance of authorities in Western countries to punish citizens who had been Holocaust perpetrators; many of those who Zuroff was able to trace died unpunished. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he launched a similar campaign in formerly communist countries; his attempts to convince Latvian and Estonian governments to de-heroize mass murderers such as Herberts Cukurs and Evald Mikson, and to bring to trial numerous others, were in vain. In 1998-99, however, he was successful in achieving the extradition to Croatia from Argentina and then the trial and punishment of Dinko Šakić. Buoyed by the success, Zuroff began Operation Last Chance, aiming to trace and bring to trial former mass murderers from the Baltics, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, Romania, etc. Relates some achievements of this operation. Zuroff's activities have occasionally evoked antisemitic and neo-Nazi backlash in the Baltics, Croatia, and elsewhere.

In this brilliant book, Roger Cohen of The New York Times weaves together the history of Yugoslavia and the story of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, as experienced by four families. “I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one,” Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West’s confidence, reviving Europe’s darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen’s compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war’s effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe’s most explosive region and its peoples. “This was a war of intimate betrayals,” Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead’s desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families—one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat—we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed. Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.