Mischling
Mischling

Author: Affinity Konar

Publisher: Lee Boudreaux Books

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0316308080

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Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past. Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad. It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain. That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks -- a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin -- travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it. A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope. "One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year"-Anthony Doerr about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II.

Divided Lives
Divided Lives

Author: Cynthia A. Crane

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2003-03-05

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9781403961556

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This book brings together the horrifying real life stories of women who woke up one day and were not who they thought they were. The government changed and they suddenly no longer had the right kind of blood, the right name, the right family background, the right physical features to be considered a member of society, city, or state. These stories are from German women who were a part of a Jewish-Christian "mixed marriage" and were subsequently persecuted under the Nuremberg laws. Hitler called them "mischling"- half-breeds, however, they have often been passed over in studies of the Holocaust--perhaps because they are often not considered "real Jews." But these women are still struggling with the nightmares of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the loss of family in concentration camps, and with their own identity-divided between their Jewish and Christian roots. Often their Jewish background was revealed to them only after Hitler's laws were passed. These are the narratives of eight women who remained in Germany, struggling to reclaim their German heritage and their cultural and religious identity. The narratives are compelling and sensitively written, addressing questions of cultural and ethnic identity.

Destined to Witness
Destined to Witness

Author: Hans Massaquoi

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 742

ISBN-13: 0061856606

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This “extraordinary” memoir of a black man’s coming of age in Nazi Germany is “an entirely engaging story of accomplishment despite adversity.” —Washington Post Book World In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of growing up black in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence. “A cry against racism, a survivor’s tale, a wartime adventure, a coming of age story, and a powerful tribute to a mother’s love.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune “An incredible tale . . . Exceptional.” —Chicago Sun Times “Destined to Witness examines a roller coaster of racism from different cultures and continents.” —The New York Times Book Review “Here is a story rarely lived and even more rarely told. We need this book for a balanced picture of the Holocaust.” —Maya Angelou “A nuanced, startling memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews “An engaging story of a young man’s journey through hate, self-enlightenment, intrigue and romance.” —Ebony

Half-Blood Blues
Half-Blood Blues

Author: Esi Edugyan

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2012-02-28

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1466802847

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Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black. Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film's premier, Sid's role in Falk's fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk's incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

Endpapers
Endpapers

Author: Alexander Wolff

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0802158277

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“A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.

Unlikely Warrior
Unlikely Warrior

Author: Georg Rauch

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0374301425

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Previously published as The Jew with the Iron Cross: a record of survival in WWII Russia. New York: iUniverse, 2006.

The Last Million
The Last Million

Author: David Nasaw

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 0143110993

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From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers
Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Author: Bryan Mark Rigg

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

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On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

Memories of a Mischling
Memories of a Mischling

Author: Marianne Gilbert Finnegan

Publisher: Xlibris

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781401032487

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Marianne Gilbert Finnegan was born in Germany just before Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor. Her Jewish father, Robert Gilbert, was a well known song writer and poet; her mother, a singer, came from a Lutheran family. By Nazi decree, the mixed marriage made their daughter a Mischling, or half breed. Fearing what was to come, the family fled Germany and eventually reached America. This is the story of Marianne's growing up in New York City while her father tried to write in English for the Broadway stage and her mother worked in factories to support the household.

Tasa's Song
Tasa's Song

Author: Linda Kass

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1631520652

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An extraordinary novel inspired by true events. 1943. Tasa Rosinski and five relatives, all Jewish, escape their rural village in eastern Poland—avoiding certain death—and find refuge in a bunker beneath a barn built by their longtime employee. A decade earlier, ten-year-old Tasa dreams of someday playing her violin like Paganini. To continue her schooling, she leaves her family for a nearby town, joining older cousin Danik at a private Catholic academy where her musical talent flourishes despite escalating political tension. But when the war breaks out and the eastern swath of Poland falls under Soviet control, Tasa’s relatives become Communist targets, her tender new relationship is imperiled, and the family’s secure world unravels. From a peaceful village in eastern Poland to a partitioned post-war Vienna, from a promising childhood to a year living underground, Tasa’s Song celebrates the bonds of love, the power of memory, the solace of music, and the enduring strength of the human spirit. 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY): Bronze Medal, Historical Fiction 2016 Foreword INDIES Book Awards: Finalist - Historical Fiction