Hannah resents stories of her Jewish heritage and of the past until, when opening the door during a Passover Seder, she finds herself in Poland during World War II where she experiences the horrors of a concentration camp, and learns why she-- and we--need to remember the past.

"The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's last days during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English, with a foreword from American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. Renia Spiegel was a young girl from an upper-middle class Jewish family living on an estate in Stawki, Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland. Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry. Her diary records how she grew up, fell in love, and was rounded up by the invading Nazis and forced to move to the ghetto in Przemsyl with all the other Jews. By luck, Renia's boyfriend Zygmund was able to find a tenement for Renia to hide in with his parents and took her out of the ghetto. This is all described in the Diary, as well as the tragedies that befell her family and her ultimate fate in 1942, as written in by Zygmund on the Diary's final page. Renia's Diary is a significant historical and psychological document. The raw, yet beautiful account depicts Renia's angst over the horrors going on around her. It has been translated from the original Polish, with notes included by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak"--

He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield tells his incredible life story. Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age fifteen and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield came face to face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp—and how an SS soldier's shirt dramatically altered the course of his life. He learned how to sew; and when he began wearing the shirt under his prisoner uniform, he learned that clothes possess great power and could even help save his life. Measure of a Man is the story of a man who suffered unimaginable horror and emerged with a dream of success. From sweeping floors at a New York clothing factory to founding America’s premier custom suit company, Greenfield built a fashion empire. Now 86 years old and working with his sons, Greenfield has dressed the famous and powerful of D.C. and Hollywood, including Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, celebrities Paul Newman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jimmy Fallon, and the stars of Martin Scorsese's films. Written with soul-baring honesty and, at times, a wry sense of humor, Measure of a Man is a memoir unlike any other—one that will inspire hope and renew faith in the resilience of man.

Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And although he doesn't know it, that book also survived: it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that book. She has her hands full keeping track of her little brother Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah) and taking copious notes in her book, How to Survive in the Wild Volume Three. But when a mysterious letter arrives in the mail she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. In her extraordinary new novel Nicole Krauss has created some of the most memorable and moving characters in recent fiction. A tale brimming with laughter, passion, and soaring imaginative power, The History of Love confirms Krauss as one of the most remarkable writers of her generation.

The shocking story of a stray child and his wanderings in Poland during World War II. A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. When the war separates a youth from his parents he begins a terrible odyssey of suffering as he wanders from village to village.

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

"Janusz Korczak (1879-1942) is one of the legendary figures to emerge from the Holocaust. A successful pediatrician and well-known author in his native Warsaw, he gave up a brilliant medical career to devote himself to the care of orphans. Like so many other Jews, Korczak was sent into the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi occupation of Poland. He immediately set up an orphanage for more than 200 children. Many of his admirers, Jewish and gentile, offered to rescue him from the ghetto, but Korczak refused to leave his small charges. When the Nazi's ordered the children to board a train that was to carry them to the Treblinka death camp, Korczak went with them, despite the Nazis' offer of special treatment. His selfless behavior in caring for these children's lives and deaths has made him beloved throughout the world: he has been honored by UNESCO and commemorated on postage stamps in both Poland and Israel."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1940, in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes to record the experiences of the ghetto's inhabitants. For three years, members of the Oyneb Shabes worked in secret to chronicle the lives of hundreds of thousands as they suffered starvation, disease, and deportation by the Nazis. Shortly before the Warsaw ghetto was emptied and razed in 1943, the Oyneg Shabes buried thousands of documents from this massive archive in milk cans and tin boxes, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them. Samuel D. Kassow tells the tragic story of Ringelblum and his heroic determination to use historical scholarship to preserve the memory of a threatened people. -- from publisher description.

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into a reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne's Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why.

In Poland in the 1940s, twins Chaim and Gittel rely on each other to endure life in a ghetto, escape through forests, and the horrors of a concentration camp.

"A landmark book that changed the story of Poland's role in the Holocaust"--

• Inspiring and fascinating tale of the strength of human spirit during one of humanity’s darkest hours; • Reminiscent of both The Diary of Anne Frank, A Woman in Berlin and Suite Francaise; • Beautifully packaged in an attractive hardback, gift format for the Christmas market and containing original photographs and maps; • A unique insight from one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, offering the only contemporary eye-witness account. After 60 years of silence, The Diary of Mary Berg is poised at last to gain the appreciation and widespread attention that it so richly deserves, and is certain to take it’s place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank as one of the most significant memoirs of the twentieth century. From love to tragedy, seamlessly combining the everyday concerns of a growing teenager with a unique commentary on life in one of the darkest contexts of history. This is a work remarkable for its authenticity, detail, and poignancy. But it is not only as a factual report on the life and death of a people that The Diary of Mary Berg ranks with the most noteworthy documents of the Second World War. This is the personal story of a life-loving girl’s encounter with unparalleled human suffering, a uniquely illuminating insight into one of the darkest chapters of history. Mary Berg was imprisoned in the ghetto from 1940 to 1943. Unlike so many others, she survived the war, rescued in a prisoner-of-war exchange due to her mother’s dual Polish-American nationality. Her diary was published in 1945 when she was still only 19, in an attempt to alert the world to the Nazi atrocities in Poland, when it was described as "one of the most heartbreaking documents yet to come out of the war" by the /New Yorker/. After the war, Berg remained in America in quiet anonimity.

Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is the moving account of the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto--written by the recognized archivist and historian of the area while he lived through it. Through anecdotes, stories, and notations--some as brief as was slapped today in Zlota Street--there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for hygienic reasons, through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility. Language Notes: English, Yiddish (translation) Emmanual Ringelblum was 39 when he began his notes. When the Germans first invaded Poland, Ringelblum, who could have stayed abroad and escaped, returned to Warsaw from Switzerland knowing that his was an historical event of importance for his people and a moment in time that must be forever a part of written history. As the recognized archivist of the Ghetto he gathered around him a staff, and assigned each to cover a specific part of Ghetto life. From these reports and this notes, he assembled his Journal. On March 7, 1944, Emmanual Ringelblum was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife, his son, and thirt-eight others who shared his hiding place.

Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world - only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time - was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946. Jan Gross's Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation? Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war's aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder - and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state. For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.

It is Warsaw in the 1930s. Aaron Greidinger is an aspiring young writer and the son of a rabbi, who struggles to be true to his art when he is faced with the chance of riches and a passport to America. But as the Nazis threaten to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood sweetheart - still living on Krochmalna Street, still strangely childlike - who has been waiting for him all these years. In the face of unimaginable horror, he chooses to stay... One of Isaac Bashevis Singer's most personal works, Shosha is an unforgettable novel about conflicted desires, lost lives and the redemption of one man.

"Judenjagd, hunt for the Jews, was the German term for the organized searches for Jews who, having survived ghetto liquidations and deportations to death camps in Poland in 1942, attempted to hide "on the Aryan side." Jan Grabowski's penetrating microhistory tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland, where the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, this close-up account of the fates of individual Jews casts a bright light on a little-known aspect of the Holocaust in Poland"--Front flap.

The complete text of the film which aroused much comment and controversy regarding accusations that Polish antisemitism had contributed to the Holocaust.

Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded ghetto away from the non-Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos, a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the closure of the Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw, their identity was chosen for them. Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed Polish Jewish cultural community, and to enter a new, Jewish neighborhood. She reveals the diversity of this group and how its members’ identity shaped their involvement in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of the acculturated and assimilated Jews in the history and memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present elucidates how the prewar ordinary town of Auschwitz became Germany's most lethal killing site step by step and in stages: a transformation wrought by human beings, mostly German and mostly male. Who were the men who conceived, created, and constructed the killing facility? What were they thinking as they inched their way to iniquity? Using the hundreds of architectural plans for the camp that the Germans, in their haste, forgot to destroy, as well as blueprints and papers in municipal, provincial, and federal archives, Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt show that the town of Auschwitz and the camp of that name were the centerpiece of Himmler's ambitious project to recover the German legacy of the Teutonic Knights and Frederick the Great in Nazi-ruled Poland. Analyzing the close ties between the 700-year history of the town and the five-year evolution of the concentration camp in its suburbs, Dwork and van Pelt offer an absolutely new and compelling interpretation of the origins and development of the death camp at Auschwitz. And drawing on oral histories of survivors, memoirs, depositions, and diaries, the authors explore the ever more murderous impact of these changes on the inmates' daily lives.

Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.