The Nazis Knew My Name
The Nazis Knew My Name

Author: Magda Hellinger

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1982181249

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The “thought-provoking…must-read” (Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped) memoir by a Holocaust survivor who saved an untold number of lives at Auschwitz through everyday acts of courage and kindness—in the vein of A Bookshop in Berlin and The Nazi Officer’s Wife. In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young women were deported as some of the first Jews to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in charge of the day-to-day accommodation blocks, they could deflect attention away from themselves. Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and put in charge of hundreds of women in the notorious Experimental Block 10. She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: saving lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS and risking execution. Through her inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers. Based on Magda’s personal account and completed by her daughter’s extensive research, this is “an unputdownable account of resilience and the power of compassion” (Booklist) in the face of indescribable evil.

Holocaust Memories
Holocaust Memories

Author: Paul Davidovits

Publisher:

Published: 2021-10

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9789493231740

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This Holocaust memoir began with an album of photographs, one of the few family possessions that survived WWII. After his mother's death the album passed on to Paul Davidovits, who became keenly aware that he was now the only person alive who recognized the people in the photographs, remembered how they were interconnected, knew about their journey through life. Davidovits now tells the stories of the inhabitants of this lost world, guiding us through his own childhood. He evocatively portrays the harrowing and traumatic unfolding of history, but also lingers on poignant moments of love, bravery, generosity and humor. Davidovits' stories are unique and finely honed, and while highly personal, their vivid depiction of survival and the determination of the human spirit - even in the face of barbarity and seemingly insurmountable odds - is universal and will remain relevant to every generation.

A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz
A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

Author: Göran Rosenberg

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1590516087

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This shattering memoir by a journalist about his father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden won the prestigious August Prize On August 2, 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town to begin his life anew. Having endured the ghetto of Lodz, the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany, his final challenge is to survive the survival. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood to tell the story of his father: walking at his side, holding his hand, trying to get close to him. It is also the story of the chasm between the world of the child, permeated by the optimism, progress, and collective oblivion of postwar Sweden, and the world of the father, darkened by the long shadows of the past.

We Are Here
We Are Here

Author: Ellen Cassedy

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0803240228

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Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.

Gatehouse to Hell
Gatehouse to Hell

Author: Felix Opatowski

Publisher: Azrieli Series of Holocaust Su

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9781897470268

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"I was stubborn. I didn't want to stay in Auschwitz. I didn't want to go to the gas chambers. I didn't want to be cremated. I didn't want to die there, and I kept pushing back."

I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

Author: Bernice Eisenstein

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13:

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In a truly innovative memoir, the author combines her skills as a writer and illustrator to recount her early childhood in the 1950s and fragmented stories of family members lost in the war.

Plunder
Plunder

Author: Menachem Kaiser

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1328506460

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A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Children of the Holocaust
Children of the Holocaust

Author: Helen Epstein

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1988-10-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0140112847

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"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived." The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found: • Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America; • Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal; • Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

The Boy on the Wooden Box
The Boy on the Wooden Box

Author: Leon Leyson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-08-29

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1471119939

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Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow. Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man, a man named Oskar Schindler, who saved Leon Leyson's life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list of workers in his factory - a list that became world renowned: Schindler's List. This, the only memoir published by a former Schindler's List child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable. Most notable is the lack of rancour, the lack of venom, and the abundance of dignity in Mr Leyson's telling. The Boy on the Wooden Boxis a legacy of hope, a memoir unlike anything you've ever read.