57 results for "World History"

Night

Wiesel, Elie,Wiesel, Marion
Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.
Penguin 2016-05-16 144 pages

The Escape Artist The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Jonathan Freedland
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller "A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information--and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" -- Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . . Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the astonishing true story of Rudolf Vrba, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world of a truth too few were willing to hear. In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom--among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world--and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen--a forensically detailed report that eventually reached Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba had risked everything to deliver. Though Vrba helped save two hundred thousand Jewish lives, he never stopped believing it could have been so many more. This is the story of a brilliant yet troubled man--a gifted "escape artist" who, even as a teenager, understood that the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death. Rudolf Vrba deserves to take his place alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, and Primo Levi as one of the handful of individuals whose stories define our understanding of the Holocaust.
HarperCollins Publishers 2022-10 400 pages

The Happiest Man on Earth

Eddie Jaku
Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed on 9 November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on the Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country. Because he survived, Eddie made the vow to smile every day. He pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom and living his best possible life. He now believes he is the 'happiest man on earth'.
Macmillan 2020 195 pages

I Cannot Forgive

Rudolf Vrba,Alan Bestic
April 7, 1944 -- Alarm sirens announce the escape of two Slovak prisoners from a heavily-guarded camp in Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, succeed and flee more than one hundred miles to give the first graphic and exact descriptions of the operations at Auschwitz, which up to that point had only been heard about as unverifiable rumours. Their report, first punished in Swiss and then in the western press, made the reality of Nazi annihilation camps explicit and unequivocal to Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Regent College Publishing 1997-10 431 pages

Auschwitz A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Miklos Nyiszli
When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform “scientific research” on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous “Angel of Death”: Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele’s personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account.
Arcade 2011-04-01 240 pages

Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi
Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man is a book written by the Italian author, Primo Levi. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months. This truly amazing story offers a revealing glimpse into the realities of the Holocaust and its effects on our world.
Must Have Books 2021-02-27 136 pages

Survivor Café The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

Elizabeth Rosner
Named a Best Book of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle "Survivor Café . . . feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart.... Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world." — San Francisco Chronicle As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten? Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory—from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small–group cross–cultural encounters. Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear–eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty–first–century human inheritance—not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever–changing conversations alive between the past and the present.
Catapult 2018-09-04 288 pages

The Lost A Search for Six of Six Million

Daniel Mendelsohn
A New York Times Notable Book * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael Chabon In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
HarperCollins Publishers 2022-08-02 688 pages

The Destruction of the European Jews 1961 First Edition Facsimile

Raul Hilberg
2019 Reprint of 1961 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Reprint of the First Edition published in 1961. The Destruction of the European Jews is widely considered the landmark study of the Holocaust. First published in 1961, Raul Hilberg's comprehensive account of how Germany annihilated the Jewish community of Europe spurred discussion, galvanized further research, and shaped the entire field of Holocaust studies. Spanning the twelve-year period of anti-Jewish actions from 1933 to 1945, Hilberg's study encompasses Germany and all the territories under German rule or influence. Its principal focus is on the large number of perpetrators―civil servants, military personnel, Nazi party functionaries, SS men, and representatives of private enterprises―in the machinery of death. Contents: Dismissals -- Aryanizations -- Property taxes -- Blocked money -- Forced labor and wage regulations -- Income taxes -- Starvation measures -- The reich-protektorat area -- Ghetto formation -- Confiscations -- Labor exploitation -- Food controls -- preparations -- The first sweep -- The killing of the prisoners of war -- The intermediary stage -- The second sweep -- The reich-protektorat area -- Poland -- The semicircular arc -- Origins of the killing centers -- Organization, personnel, and maintenance -- Labor utilization -- Medical experiments -- Confiscations -- Killing operations -- Liquidation of the killing centers and the end of the destruction process.
Martino Fine Books 2019-06-20 804 pages

Churchill and the Jews

Martin Gilbert
Visiting Israel in 1972, Gilbert discussed Winston Churchill’s influence on the evolution of the Zionist ideal with the Israeli leader, David Ben-Gurion, at whose last meeting with Churchill in 1960, Churchill declared: “You are a wise leader of a brave people.” Born into a British class and society that was far from well-disposed towards Jews, Churchill rejected anti-Semitic attitudes. In the early 1920s, as a senior member of the British government, Churchill took a lead in securing for the Jews a National Home in Palestine that would be open to Jewish immigration from all over the world. In 1948, Churchill urged immediate recognition of the State of Israel, and, in 1951, strongly supported Israel’s right — denied by Egypt — of free passage through the Suez Canal. The book also details acts of rescue initiated by Churchill on behalf of European Jewry during the Second World War. When Churchill was asked to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, his response was immediate: “Get anything out of the air force you can.” Gilbert follows this story to its unexpected conclusion, and the saving of more than 100,000 Jewish lives. Many times during fifty years of public life, Churchill was called upon by the Jews of Britain to intervene on their behalf both nationally and internationally. His responses made it clear to them that he was, as he once expressed it, “their friend.”
McClelland & Stewart 2007 359 pages

Elli: coming of age in the holocaust

Bitton Jackson, Livia E.
'Among the most moving documents I have read in years ... You will not forget it' Elie Wiesel From her small, sunny hometown between the beautiful Carpathian Mountains and the blue Danube River, Elli Friedmann was taken - at a time when most girls are growing up, having boyfriends and embarking upon the adventure of life - and thrown into the murderous hell of Hitler's Final Solution. When Elli emerged from Auschwitz and Dachau just over a year later, she was fourteen. She looked like a sixty year old. This account of horrifyingly brutal inhumanity - and dogged survival - is Elli's true story.
Times Books 1980 270 pages

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Giorgio Bassani
This story of love and blighted hopes is set in Fascist Italy on the eve of World War II. It details the relationship of two young Jews in the provincial town of Ferrara. When the Fascist regime establish more restrictive racial laws, the narrator and young Micol Finzi-Contini are drawn together. Only through the filter of distance and time does he come to know all he loses.
Fine Communications 1996-08 200 pages

Five Chimneys

Olga Lengyel
Memoir of a Hungarian woman who was imprisoned for several years in the German concentration camp Auschwitz. This is the true, documented chronicle of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare horror of the worst death camp of them all. Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. ""You have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak.""-Albert Einstein "This book is a horrifying, but necessary, reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization."-New York Herald-Tribune "It is a picture of utter hell."-Saturday Review of Literature
Repro India Limited 2021-09-27 242 pages