42 results for "Children"

Beyond these walls: escaping the Warsaw Ghetto - a young girl's story

Bauman, Janina
Janina Bauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War began but, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a story of survival. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, Janina, an intelligent, lively girl, suddenly found herself in a cramped flat, hiding with other Jewish families. At first even curfews and the casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina, with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal. Told through her teenage diaries, giving her story a rare immediacy, this is the extraordinary tale of a passionate young woman's courage and survival.
Virago 2006-08-03 289 pages

Surviving the angel of death: the true story of a mengele twin in auschwitz

Kor, Eva Mozes,Rojany-Buccieri, Lisa
"Eva Mozes Kor was just ten years old when she arrived in Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Subjected to sadistic medical experiments, she was forced to fight daily for her and her twin's survival. In this incredible true story written for young adults, readers learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil and Eva's recovery and her controversial but often misunderstood decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Readers will learn of how she triumphed over unfathomable pain and suffering into a life-long work for peace, human rights, and Holocaust education. The new edition provides interesting details and important context to the events related in the original story. A new Afterword by publisher Peggy Porter Tierney offers a richer portrayal of Eva as a person, the truth behind the controversies, and the eventful last ten years of her life"--
Tanglewood 2020-10-13 183 pages

Medicine in translation: journeys with my patients

Ofri, Danielle
For two decades, Dr. Danielle Ofri has cared for patients at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in the country and a crossroads for the world's cultures. In Medicine in Translation , she introduces us, in vivid, moving portraits, to the patients she has known. They have braved language barriers, religious and racial divides, and the emotional and practical difficulties of exile in order to access quality health care. Sharing their journeys with them over the years, Danielle has witnessed some of their best and worst moments, and come to admire their resilience and courageous spirit. Danielle introduces us to her patients: Samuel Nwanko, who was brutally attacked by a Nigerian cult in his homeland and is attempting to create a new life in America; Jade Collier, an Aussie who refuses to let a small thing like a wheelchair keep her from being a homegrown ambassador to New York City; Julia Barquero, a Guatemalan woman who migrated to the States to save her disabled son but cannot obtain the lifesaving heart transplant she needs because she is undocumented. We meet a young Muslim woman threatened at knifepoint for wearing her veil, and the spitfire Señora Estrella, one of Danielle's many Spanish-speaking patients, whose torrent of words helps seal Danielle's resolve to improve her own Spanish, an essential skill in today's urban hospitals. And so she, her husband, and their two young children and seventy-five-pound dog relocate to Costa Rica, where they discover potholes the size of their New York City apartment, a casual absence of street signs or even street names, tangy green-skinned limon dulce dangling in the playground, and sudden rains surging over the craggy edges of roadside ditches. Ultimately, Danielle experiences being a patient in a foreign country when she gives birth to their third child, a "Costarricense" girl. With controversy over immigrants in our society escalating, and debate surrounding health-care reform becoming increasingly urgent, Ofri's riveting stories about her patients could not be more timely. Living and dying in the foreign country we call home, they have much to teach us about the American way, in sickness and in health.
Beacon Press 2010 251 pages

Still alive: a Holocaust girlhood remembered

Klüger, Ruth
Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth.
Feminist Press at the City University of New York 2001 216 pages

Hitler, my neighbor: memories of a Jewish childhood

Feuchtwanger, E. J.
"An eminent historian recounts the Nazi rise to power from his unique perspective as a young Jewish boy in Munich, living with Adolf Hitler as his neighbor. Watching events unfold from his window, Edgar bore witness to the Night of the Long Knives, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht. Jews were arrested; his father was imprisoned at Dachau. In 1939 Edgar was sent on his own to England, where he would make a new life, a career, have a family, and strive to forget the nightmare of his past--a past that came rushing back when he decided, at the age of eighty-eight, to tell the story of his buried childhood and his infamous neighbor"--Provided by publisher.
Other Press 2017-11-07 209 pages

Shores beyond shores: from Holocaust to hope : my true story

Butter, Irene H.,Bidwell, John,Holloway, Kris
As Irene's Pappi fights to save his family during the Holocaust, Irene's childhood is lost. Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene's father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler's Germany. By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene tends her ailing parents, cares for starving kids, and even helps bring clothes to her Amsterdam neighbor Anne Frank, before her family is offered a singular chance for freedom...providing the Nazi doctor says they are healthy enough. After two weeks of heart-lifting miracles and heart-breaking tragedies, Irene arrives in the Algerian desert to journey into redemption and womanhood, without her parents or brother. Irene's first person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times. Irene's hard-earned lessons are a timeless inspiration. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Following publication of an article on the Holocaust on April 13, 2018, Irene wrote a letter to the Editor which was published April 17, 2018 in The New York Times: Holocaust Survivors 'Have Voices That Matter' April 17, 2018 Re "Getting Facts Wrong on the Holocaust" (news article, April 13): More than four decades passed before I could break the silence about my traumatic experiences during the Holocaust. It is a formidable challenge for survivors to speak and for others to listen. The number of survivors is dwindling; they are getting quite old and their memories are fading. Yet it is ever more important that the signs of authoritarian regimes and how they evolved are brought into the consciousness of youths and adults, as warning signals of what must be prevented from happening again. Survivors, when able, have the responsibility to bear witness and provide evidence so that the six million Jews who were murdered are not forgotten, so that perpetrators are not pardoned for their crimes, and so that deniers don't have a leg to stand on. While the voices of the victims have been silenced forever, we the survivors have voices that matter. After four decades of not speaking, I realized that silence was no longer an option. I told my stories to my children and grandchildren as well as to many students in many schools over a 30-year period. Schools and other organizations should take advantage of every opportunity to engage survivors to tell their stories. IRENE BUTTER, ANN ARBOR, MICH. The writer survived two concentration camps, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. She recently published her memoir, "Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope."
White River Press 2018 273 pages

The diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: five notebooks from the Łódź ghetto

Sierakowiak, Dawid
"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe.The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children.The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.
Oxford University Press 1996-11-07 271 pages

After the roundup: escape and survival in Hitler's France

Weismann, Joseph
On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. They were held for five days at the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, before being sent by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande transit camp. But where would they be transported to? Separated from his parents, who were deported to Auschwitz and certain death, Joseph remained with 1,000 other separated children, as they waited to discover their fates. But instead of waiting, Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt. After eluding the guards and crawling under razor-sharp barbed wire, Joseph found freedom. But how would he survive the rest of the war in Nazi-occupied France and build a life for himself? His nightmare had just begun. After the Roundup is a story of hope, friendship, and courage in the face repression, hatred, and fear. This graphic novel, originally published in French, is based on Weismann's memoir of the same name.
Indiana University Press 2017-04-24 161 pages

Children of the flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the untold story of the twins of Auschwitz

Matalon Lagnado, Lucette
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.
Morrow 1991 320 pages

Free as a Jew: a personal memoir of national self-liberation

Wisse, Ruth R.
"First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide--but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered."--Book flap.
Wicked Son 2021-09-21 359 pages

Burned child seeks the fire: a memoir

Edvardson, Cordelia
[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
Beacon Press 1997 105 pages

Hunting the truth: memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld

Klarsfeld, Beate,Klarsfeld, Serge
"For more than half a century, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, and exposed Nazi war criminals, tracking them down in places as far-flung as South America and the Middle East. It is they who uncovered the notorious torturer Klaus Barbie, known as 'the Butcher of Lyon, ' in Bolivia. It is they who outed Kurt Lischka as chief of the Gestapo in Paris, the man responsible for the largest deportation of French Jews. And it is they who, with the help of their son, Arno, brought the Vichy police chief Maurice Papon to justice. They were born on opposite sides of the Second World War. Beate's father was in the Wehrmacht, while Serge's father was deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew. But when Serge and Beate met on the Paris metro, they instantly fell in love. They soon married and have since dedicated their lives to 'hunting the truth'--both as world-famous Nazi hunters and as meticulous documenters of the fate of the innocent French Jewish children who were killed in the death camps. They have been jailed and targeted by letter bombs, and their car was even blown up. Yet nothing has daunted the Klarsfelds in their pursuit of justice. Beate made worldwide headlines at age twenty-nine by slapping the high-profile ex-Nazi propagandist Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and shouting 'Nazi!' Serge intentionally provoked a neo-Nazi in a German beer hall by wearing an armband with a yellow star on it, so that the press would report on the assault. When Pope John Paul II met with Austria's then-president, Kurt Waldheim, a former Wehrmacht officer in the Balkans suspected of war crimes, the Klarsfelds' son, dressed as a Nazi officer, stood outside the Vatican. The Klarsfelds also dedicated themselves to defeating Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and his daughter Marine Le Pen's 2017 campaign for president in France. Brave, urgent, and buoyed by a remarkable love story, Hunting the Truth is not only the dramatic memoir of bringing Nazis to justice, it is also the inspiring story of an unrelenting battle against prejudice and hate."--Back cover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019-03-12 454 pages

Child of war

Seltzer, Nachman
Memoirs of Friedman, born in 1936 in Budapest, whose hasidic family survived in and around his native city, thanks to their luck or Divine providence, and their abilities - including his father's skillful forging of fake documents, the daring of his young aunts, and the acting ability of his mother and himself. Friedman, his mother, and baby brother survived posing as non-Jews in Buda, while most of the city's Jews were in danger in Pest. He pretended to be mentally ill due to the absence of a father serving in the Hungarian army, while his father was actually sheltered in the "glass house". Includes a brief account of how one aunt escaped on the Kasztner train. One sister was hidden in a convent until the Jewish children were found by the Gestapo, but she was saved by the ingenuity of her aunt Irene. Another sister was hidden in the countryside, discovered by the fascists, and rescued by her Aunt Edith. One relative survived by pretending to be a Gypsy violinist; another found refuge in a mental hospital. Friedman's grandmother escaped from a death march. Relates some of the horrors of life under the Arrow Cross, and the difficulty of remaining alive until the Russians liberated the city.
Mesorah Publications 2009 267 pages

An end to Childhood

Akavia, Miriam
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.
Vallentine Mitchell 2003-10-01 171 pages