38 results for "Memoir"

The traitors circle: the true story of a secret resistance network in Nazi Germany--and the spy who betrayed them

Freedland, Jonathan
"When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth. Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer's afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo. They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering headmistress. What unites every one of them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler, and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance: meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule. Or so they believe. How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruelest men, they showed a heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history that raises the question: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?"-- Provided by publisher.
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2025-10-28 456 pages

By Chance Alone A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz

Max Eisen
An award-winning, internationally bestselling Holocaust memoir in the tradition of Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz In the spring of 1944, gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor "Max" Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer. More than seventy years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisen's story of survival: the backbreaking slave labor in Auschwitz I, the infamous death march in January 1945, the painful aftermath of liberation and Eisen's journey of physical and psychological healing. Ultimately, the book offers a message of hope as the author finds his way to a new life.
Hanover Square Press 2020 304 pages

The kindly ones: a novel

Littell, Jonathan
Fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in graphic, disturbingly precise detail from the dark and disturbing point of view of the executioner rather than the victim. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself.
Harper 2009-03-03 983 pages

The Holocaust years: the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945

Levin, Nora
Covered here are the events involved in the preparation and implementation of the planned annihilation of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. Part I is a compact history of preparatory steps leading to the decision to destroy the Jews physically, including Western anti-Semitic practices and doctrines, the collapse of the Weimar Republic leading to the rise of Nazism and Hitler's rise to power, the early anti-Jewish laws and the crucial events of 1938, including Kristallnacht. The text also deals with the German invasion of Russia and the mass executions of Jews by mobile killing units that accompanied the army, forced ghettoization of Jews in German-occupied Europe, Jewish resistance efforts, deportations from western, central, and southeastern Europe, and rescue efforts and failures. Part II includes 100 readings that document and elucidate these events and include first-hand testimony, official Nazi and Allied documents, eyewitness accounts, and diary and memoir excerpts.
R.E. Krieger 1990 373 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

Small numbers, big presence: Jews in Poland after World War II

Krajewski, Stanisław
"In the post-war era Jews have been incomparably less numerous than before and often deeply assimilated. Still, their presence's felt as big. The book is scholarly and also deeply personal. Most of the events and processes described here have a strong connection to the author's life, particularly the post-1968 mini-renaissance of Jewish life, especially in its religious variety, and advances in the realm of Jewish-Christian relations and particularly of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In addition to an account of the history of Jews in Poland after 1945, Jewish-Christian dialogue in that period, including meeting with the Polish pope, the chapters treat the concept of de-assimilation used as a key to understand the most recent phase of the story, analyze how Jewish were Jewish Communists, ponder what were the assumptions behind the post-war section of the core exhibition in POLIN, and offer an original proposal why the Holocaust is widely considered as unique"--
Peter Lang 2024 241 pages

Solidarity and Treason Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940

Lisa Fittko
Lisa Fittko's Escape through the Pyrenees (Northwestern, 1991) told the extraordinary true tale of her life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the Nazi invasion of 1940, when she and her husband smuggled small groups of refugees to safety along a tortuous route through the mountains. Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 is Fittko's equally gripping memoir of the preceding years in the underground and exile. The volume opens with Hitler's.
Northwestern University Press 1993 160 pages

Imperfect justice: looted assets, slave labor, and the unfinished business of World War II

Eizenstat, Stuart
A personal memoir by Eizenstat, who served under President Carter in several capacities, including secretary of state on Holocaust issues, relating his experiences in negotiations with governments of and/or business representatives from Switzerland, Austria, France, and Germany to pay compensation to Holocaust victims or their heirs for looted property and for suffering (slave labor) under the Nazis. Swiss gold, stolen art, and other stolen property of individuals and communities were finally repaid through agreements reached or encouraged by U.S. class-action suits. In addition to the "imperfect justice" of financial recompense, notes the moral success of furthering the truth and inspiring international efforts at Holocaust education. also discusses the author's role in helping establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Public Affairs 2003 401 pages

Why the Germans do it better: notes from a grown-up country

Kampfner, John
Emerging from a collection of city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a critical and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate. Raising important questions for our post-Brexit landscape, Kampfner asks why, despite its faults, Germany has become a model for others to emulate, while Britain fails to tackle contemporary challenges. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, Why the Germans Do It Better is a rich and witty portrait of an eternally fascinating country.
Atlantic Books 2021-06 315 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

The unwelcome one: returning home from Auschwitz

Frankenthal, Hans
After surviving the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Hans Frankenthal chose to return to live in his hometown of Schmallenberg, Germany at the age of 19. In this memoir, he describes his experiences working as a butcher in the town, a town emptied of its Jewish residences where few wanted to hear about his experiences during the war. He also describes his experiences after retirement, when he finally spoke out and became an advocate for those who had been forced to work as slave laborers for the company I.G. Farben. Translated from Verweigerte Rueckkehr (1999). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Northwestern University Press 2002 169 pages

The Kaisers

Aronson, Theo
The Kaisers were only in power for less than fifty years, but their reigns would shape the fate of Europe forever… There were only three Kaisers, and their reigns lasted for less than fifty years. Yet their time on the throne was marked by drama, turbulence, and a bloody impact upon the lives of millions. The short lived Second Reich born out of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and defeated on the Western Front in 1918 is without parallel. The Kaisers is the story of six people whose influence changed the world. Wilhelm I, Frederick II, Wilhelm II and their wives had huge control over the recently unified Germany. They were military minded, autocratic men who, caught in bitter, almost continual conflict, found themselves on an inevitable path to destruction. The Kaisers is a comprehensive study of the rise and fall of the House of Hohenzollern that shows the light and shade of the Kaisers as well as explaining why they are perhaps deserving of our understanding and compassion. Praise for Theo Aronson: 'A lively and eminently readable book' - The Teacher 'An engrossing piece of almost contemporary history' - Homes & Gardens 'A vivid evocation of the lives and characters of the personalities involved' - The Observer Theo Aronson is the author of over twenty works of royal historical biography, published in eleven languages. Among the widely read are Grandmama of Europe, The King in Love, Napoleon and Josephine and a biography of Princess Margaret. In the course of researching and writing these books he has interviewed major and minor members of Britain’s royal family and members of the royal households, as well as various officials, servants, friends and others whose lives are in some way connected with the monarchy.
Independently published 2021-05-14 280 pages

Jews, Germans, and Allies: close encounters in occupied Germany

Grossmann, Atina
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.
Princeton University Press 2007-09-24 393 pages

Einstein's German World

Stern, Fritz
The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.
Princeton University Press 2016-05-24 335 pages

Slow Fire Jewish Notes from Berlin

Susan Neiman
Berlin--"East" and "West," day and of course night--throughout the 80s before the Wall came down. In the eyes of an American philosophy student. And Jewish, which makes for moments at once awkward, poignant, resonant, unspoken, crass, funny, and always lurking. Most of all, Susan Neiman can write, as borne out again by her books to follow this debut. Here, we live the Reagan years with her--when a city was divided, America the occupier, and the cigarettes not named "Salem" because it sounds too Jewish. Peter Becker folded an easel in the corner to make a table. He brought cold cuts and bread and asked me what I thought of his paintings. Later I would learn that people here always ask you what you think of their paintings, and that it's wrong just to say you find them interesting, but perfectly alright to say you find them awful. . . . You come from a Jewish family, don't you?" asked Becker. "Yes," I said. "It doesn't matter," said the other painter. Doesn't matter? To whom?
Quid Pro, LLC 2010-08-23 224 pages

Soldiers of Evil The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Tom Segev
Based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University. They were soldiers and killers, trapped in the mystiques of military service & evil--commanders of the Nazi concentration camps. This book tells their story: who these men were, what led them to join the Nazi movement, & how they could function in the everyday routine of torture & death. 8 pages of photos.
Diamond Books 2000 304 pages

Peter Owen, not a nice Jewish boy: memoirs of a Maverick publisher

Owen, Peter,Nye, James
In this wry, candid, and sometimes poignant memoir, Peter Owen recalls his lonely Jewish boyhood in Nazi Germany and migration to England where he survived the London Blitz, a teenage dalliance with aspiring actress Fenella Fielding, and working with a motley variety of book publishers. He founded his eponymous publishing firm in 1951, becoming one of the youngest publishers in Britain. A pioneer of books on social themes, gay and lesbian writing, and literature in translation, Owen's authors included ten Nobel laureates and brought Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, and Anaïs Nin to a wider audience. Enjoying their success, he and his wife Wendy were memorably stylish and eccentric figures at the literary parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Owen describes his often hilarious encounters with many of those he published, including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Salvador Dalí, his adventures in Japan with Yukio Mishima and Shūsaku Endō, and in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and Paul and Jane Bowles. As one of the last of the great émigré publishers, his death in 2016 aged 89 signalled the end of a literary era.
Fonthill Media 2021 255 pages