During the Holocaust, many individuals and groups risked their lives to rescue Jews who had fled from the dangers of Nazi-occupied territory. They provided the refugees with hiding places, food and clothing, and forged documents to help them escape. When the Allies liberated the Holocaust camps at the end of the war, the world finally learned the truth about the atrocities committed by the Third Reich.
In the last days of World War II, American soldiers freed a trainload of Jewish prisoners heading to certain death at Nazi hands. Rich with eyewitness testimony, this gripping narrative follows both the survivors and their liberators in vivid detail.
The life-altering experiences of the American soldiers who liberated three Nazi concentration camps. On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and—perhaps most disturbing of all—the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes. Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this often-overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a rich blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts—including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections—Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history.
The Macmillan Profiles series is a collection of volumes featuring profiles of famous people, places and historical events. This text profiles heroes and activists of the Holocaust, including Elie Wiesel, Oskar Schindler, Simon Wiesenthal, Primo Levi, Anne Frank and Raoul Wallenberg, as well as soldiers, Partisans, ghetto leaders, diplomats and ordinary citizens who fought German aggression and risked their lives to save Jews.
The Holocaust – the murder of approximately six million Jewish men, women and children by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Second World War – was a crime of unprecedented and unparalleled proportions, perpetrated in innumerable locations across the European continent. Now in its third edition, The Holocaust Sites of Europe is the most comprehensive and accessible guide to these sites, serving as both a work of historical reference and a practical resource for visitors to them today. It includes all major Holocaust sites in Europe, covering more than 20 countries and encompassing not only iconic locations such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, but also lesser known yet similarly significant sites like Maly Trostenets and Sajmište. It addresses extermination, forced labour and concentration camps, massacre sites, and cities which were homes to major Jewish populations and – often – ghettos, as well as Nazi 'euthanasia' centres and locations associated with the genocide of Roma and Sinti. In so doing, the book also covers the many museums and memorials which commemorate the Holocaust. This new edition has been fully updated to reflect developments which have affected sites in the 2010s and 2020s, ranging from the establishment of new museums to growing threats from climate change and state-sponsored distortion of history. The Holocaust Sites of Europe is thus an indispensable and sensitive guide to both the history and the modern reality of the most traumatic sites in European history."
Thanks to Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's Ark, and the film based on it, Schindler's List, we have become more aware of the fact that, in the midst of Hitler's extermination of the Jews, courage and humanity could still overcome evil. While 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, some were saved through the actions of non-Jews whose consciences would not allow them to pass by on the other side, and many are honoured by Yad Vashem as 'Righteous Among the Nations' for their actions. As a baby, Agnes Grunwald-Spier was herself saved from the horrors of Auschwitz by an unknown official, and is now a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She has collected together the stories of thirty individuals who rescued Jews, and these provide a new insight into why these people were prepared to risk so much for their fellow men and women. With a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the leading experts on the subject, this is an ultimately uplifting account of how some good deeds really do shine in a weary world.
At last, the everyday fighting men who were the first Americans to know the full and horrifying truth about the Holocaust share their astonishing stories. Here we meet the brave souls who--now in their eighties and nineties--have chosen at last to share their stories.
This is the only book to be published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army's uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp, how the surviving prisoners were rescued, how the inmates were evacuated, how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world's largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates, how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for, how they were repatriated to their own countries, why many thousand refused to return 'home' and the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. The author of this book was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial.
The “striking” holocaust memoir that that inspired the Oscar-winning film “conveys with exceptional immediacy . . . the author’s desperate fight for survival” (Kirkus Reviews). On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling. “Szpilman’s memoir of life in the Warsaw ghetto is remarkable not only for the heroism of its protagonists but for the author’s lack of bitterness, even optimism, in recounting the events.” —Library Journal “Employing language that has more in common with the understatement of Primo Levi than with the moral urgency of Elie Wiesel, Szpilman is a remarkably lucid observer and chronicler of how, while his family perished, he survived thanks to a combination of resourcefulness and chance.” —Publishers Weekly “[Szpilman’s] account is hair-raising beyond anything Hollywood could invent . . . an altogether unforgettable book.” —The Daily Telegraph “[Szpilman’s] shock and ensuing numbness become ours, so that acts of ordinary kindness or humanity take on an aura of miracle.” —The Observer
Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People's Republic. Since 1945, Auschwitz has functioned as a memorial and museum. Its monuments, exhibitions, and public spaces have attracted politicians, pilgrims, and countless participants in public demonstrations and commemorative events. Jonathan Huener's study begins with the liberation of the camp and traces the history of the State Museum at Auschwitz from its origins immediately after the war until the 1980s, analyzing the landscape, exhibitions, and public events at the site. Based on extensive research and illustrated with archival photographs, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration accounts for the development and durability of a Polish commemorative idiom at Auschwitz. Emphasis on Polish national “martyrdom” at Auschwitz, neglect of the Shoah as the most prominent element of the camp's history, political instrumentalization of the grounds and exhibitions—these were some of the more controversial aspects of the camp's postwar landscape. Professor Huener locates these and other public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in the broad scope of Polish history, in the specific context of postwar Polish politics and culture, and against the background of Polish-Jewish relations. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers of the history of modern Poland and the Holocaust.
