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.

It's the story no one would tell. On May 3, 1945, the Royal Air Force attacked a fleet of ships carrying more than seven thousand survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The war was nearly over, and the survivors had endured one of history's most hellish ordeals, only to die at the hands of their allies. The bodies, in the striped white-and-black uniforms of camp prisoners, were soon washing ashore on the beach by the town of Timmendorf, near the Baltic port of Neustadt. Benjamin Jacobs, then twenty-five, survived by escaping the hold and clinging to wreckage. He was one of only 350 survivors, and one of the last of those. Days before, Jacobs had boarded the Cap Arcona, along with thousands of other prisoners. A commandeered luxury liner, the Cap Arcona was a dilapidated wreck. Nearby, the freighter Thielbek, in similar condition, was also attacked. There is reason to believe the Germans were intending to sink the Cap Arcona themselves. Though they claimed the prisoners were headed to Sweden, the ships may have been nonfunctional. The Royal Air Force believed the ships contained escaping SS officers. Tragically, British intelligence may have known who was on the ships, which may explain why the RAF has sealed the records until 2045. In The 100-Year Secret Benjamin Jacobs collaborates with writer Eugene Pool to describe his miraculous escape from a burning transport ship that was once one of the most glamorous ocean liners of the early twentieth century, and investigates why the incident, which will have its 60th anniversary in May, 2005, appears in no history books. The governments of Germany and Great Britain continue to refuse either to discuss it or to release pertinent records, The 100-Year Secret is the first complete account in English of this horrific and suppressed tragedy. It is also the first book-length description by an actual survivor. Furthermore, it contains new information about the incident, its participants, and its perpetrators not found in previous accounts. It is both the riveting personal story of a man who refused to give up, no matter what the circumstances, and an important revision of both Jewish and world history.

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.

Out of the ashes of the Nazi concentration camps came an extraordinary love story which caught the public's imagination at the end of World War II. This autobiography tells how the author survived the camps and met her husband, a sergeant working for British intelligence, when he arrived to round up the SS guards for interrogation. Norman Turgel, then a young man, was among the first to enter the camp on April 15, 1945, and like so many battle-hardened soldiers, was deeply shocked and angered by the human suffering and degradation he witnessed. Yet it was here, in the midst of the living evidence of the most terrible suffering that man has ever inflicted on his fellow human beings, that he fell in love at first sight. Gena, a young Polish Jewish inmate of the camp, who had experienced indescribable loss, hardship, and deprivation, was to survive and find happiness against all odds. This is Gena's story: the autobiography of a woman whose strength of spirit enabled her to keep her mother alive and thereby save herself. When Gena married Norman in Germany in October 1945 in a wedding dress made of British parachute silk, the British Army Rabbi proclaimed their love a symbol of hope after so much death. But, Gena still lights a candle in memory of her three brothers and two sisters who died in the Holocaust. And, while her own story has a happy ending, she can never forget.