A 78-year-old man is attacked in the basement of an apartment building in the south of Paris, brutally beaten and left for dead. Reading the story in the newspaper the next morning, Gabriel Lecouvreur - AKA Private Detective Le Poulpe - recognises the victim's name as that of a once-gifted and controversial author, Andre Sloga, who had slipped into obscurity. Lecouvreur discovers that Sloga had in fact been hard at work on an explosive book exposing the scandals of a prominent industrialist and his family.
Twenty years after Doomsday, survivors of World War Three live in an underground world they have created in the subway system of Moscow. The most stubborn of the survivors, Artyom, will give anything to find and lead his own people to life again on the earth's surface.
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.
HAS A NAZI GOLD TRAIN BEEN HIDDEN IN A MOUNTAIN TUNNEL SINCE WORLD WAR II? Paul Silver, an international businessman and amateur adventurer, arrives in Berlin looking for information about a fabled Nazi train full of priceless objects and gold. Along with answers he finds a deranged man who hated him in the past, a man who wants revenge more than life itself. There have been rumors for decades about a train filled with so much wealth it could fund Hitler's dream of a Fourth Reich. A Romanian family believes its patriarch, one of Hitler's trusted officers, possesses a coded diary - a book that will lead to vast treasure hidden somewhere in Europe at the end of the war. Paul soon learns nothing is as it should be. A hundred-year-old murderer, a gypsy fortune-teller, a trio of greedy relatives and a search for the mysterious Nazi train lead Paul Silver on the most exciting adventure of his life.
From the late 1930s to the early twenty-first century, European and American filmmakers have displayed an enduring fascination with Nazi leaders, rituals, and symbols, making scores of films from Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Watch on the Rhine (1943) through Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1955) and Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), up to Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and beyond. Probing the emotional sources and effects of this fascination, Sabine Hake looks at the historical relationship between film and fascism and its far-reaching implications for mass culture, media society, and political life. In confronting the specter and spectacle of fascist power, these films not only depict historical figures and events but also demand emotional responses from their audiences, infusing the abstract ideals of democracy, liberalism, and pluralism with new meaning and relevance. Hake underscores her argument with a comprehensive discussion of films, including perspectives on production history, film authorship, reception history, and questions of performance, spectatorship, and intertextuality. Chapters focus on the Hollywood anti-Nazi films of the 1940s, the West German anti-Nazi films of the 1950s, the East German anti-fascist films of the 1960s, the Italian “Naziploitation” films of the 1970s, and issues related to fascist aesthetics, the ethics of resistance, and questions of historicization in films of the 1980s–2000s from the United States and numerous European countries.
As Metro stretches to Tysons Corner and beyond, this paperback edition features a new preface from the author. Drivers in the nation's capital face a host of hazards: high-speed traffic circles, presidential motorcades, jaywalking tourists, and bewildering signs that send unsuspecting motorists from the Lincoln Memorial into suburban Virginia in less than two minutes. And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. Little wonder, then, that so many residents and visitors rely on the Washington Metro, the 106-mile rapid transit system that serves the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs. In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society Subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry. Unlike the pre–World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision? Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. The Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create "a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Schrag scrutinizes the project from its earliest days, including general planning, routes, station architecture, funding decisions, land-use impacts, and the behavior of Metro riders. The story of the Great Society Subway sheds light on the development of metropolitan Washington, postwar urban policy, and the promises and limits of rail transit in American cities.
""Well researched, readable, and very interesting"" --Choice ""Nazis in Newark is a model local history that reaches well beyond the border of Essex County, New Jersey, to the national and international arenas. By recounting so many sides of the complicated encounter between Nazis and Jews in Newark, Warren Grover has fashioned a world of street politics, boycotts, Nazi louts and Jewish bruisers that is as compelling and telling in its detail as any grand tome on the supposed failures and successes of American Jewish resistence to the Holocaust... I recommend Nazis in Newark. I intend to use it as a cornerstone of my teaching for some time to come."" --Professor Michael Alexander The Jewish Quarterly Review ""Very few people today realize that the U.S. mainland was the scene of battles against the Nazis. Warren Grover has produced an outstanding work on this subject. The writing is incisive, the ideas are both original and insightful and the thesis masterfully developed and executed. Must reading for anyone interested in American history and ethnic studies."" --William B. Helmreich, CUNY Graduate Center and author of The Enduring Community ""Thanks to tenacious research and deft story-telling, Warren Grover has put the politics of extremism in one city in the shadow of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, and has thus illuminated the terrible dilemmas of the 1930s. His book also compels the reader to consider an historical anomaly: champions of the Third Reich come across as victims whose civil liberties were infringed, and the gangs of Newark responsible for these violations tended to be Jewish. Such ironies make Nazis in Newark worth the interest of anyone intrigued by ethnic conflict and politcal violence in urban America."" --Stephen Whitfield, Max Richter Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University ""In this fast-paced, thorough study of anti-Nazism in Newark, scholar Warren Grover tells th
It was 1944, and it wouldn't be long before World War II was over, and the Germans would be defeated by the United States and the help of other allies. War is hell, and the haunting memory of the atrocities that went on with innocent people in the concentration camps would go unpunished for many SS Nazi soldiers. But some of that would not be the case when they boarded a train and headed back to their homes to their families. There was laughter, smoking, and plenty of beer to celebrate even though they lost the war. These soldiers were just glad it was over and ready to put this horrid memory behind them all and lead healthy life with their families when they got back home. As for this bloodthirsty cold as ice SS soldiers, this train ride was bound for hell. Somehow ten minutes into the trip, the engineer suffered a massive heart attack and didn't have time to slow the train down to a complete stop. So, the train was running full speed ahead on a course for self-destruction. None of the soldiers had a clue that moments later they would all be dead. The soldiers were too absorbed in the moment of laughter and drunkenness to notice that something went wrong. If the engineer were still alive, he would have slowed the train down. Then quickly made the turn around the curve but since he isn't the train jumped the track, and all the rail cars broke apart, sending all the SS Nazi soldiers to their deaths. When the train never arrived at the train station, the families of the soldiers knew something was wrong and notified the police to investigate immediately.
Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of "a Hollywood girl in Naziland!"; and Professor Mamlock (1938), an anti-Nazi film made by German refugees living in the Soviet Union. Doherty also recounts how the disproportionately Jewish backgrounds of the executives of the studios and the workers on the payroll shaded reactions to what was never simply a business decision. As Europe hurtled toward war, a proxy battle waged in Hollywood over how to conduct business with the Nazis, how to cover Hitler and his victims in the newsreels, and whether to address or ignore Nazism in Hollywood feature films. Should Hollywood lie low, or stand tall and sound the alarm? Doherty's history features a cast of charismatic personalities: Carl Laemmle, the German Jewish founder of Universal Pictures, whose production of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) enraged the nascent Nazi movement; Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, who read the Hollywood trade press as avidly as any studio mogul; Vittorio Mussolini, son of the fascist dictator and aspiring motion picture impresario; Leni Riefenstahl, the Valkyrie goddess of the Third Reich who came to America to peddle distribution rights for Olympia (1938); screenwriters Donald Ogden Stewart and Dorothy Parker, founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; and Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who yoked anti-Nazism to patriotic Americanism and finally broke the embargo against anti-Nazi cinema with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).
A classic of children's literature, translated into several languages. Separated from his parents who are deported by the Nazis, David struggles to survive, alone, hungry and scared, until he eventually finds his way to the city of Warsaw. There he learns from other Jewish boys how to work in the black market, dodging the police and the Gestapo until the terrible day comes when the Warsaw ghetto is cleared and everyone is herded onto trains for the long trip to the camps. Will David survive? Can he outwit them one more time? Shortlisted for The Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. Reviews: “How was it possible for Stig Dalager to write about the last years of the story of David in such a shocking and convincing way that one should think that this was written by Isaac B. Singer or one of the other Polish-Jewish geniuses?” -Jewish Information Magazine “Dalager has written a shockingly relevant historical novel, a taut story of international standing and appeal. A monument to our own shame, at that time and now.” -Politiken Newspaper, Denmark "Despite being a translation of Stig Dalager's original Danish text, this is one of the most readable and accessible accounts of the Holocaust I have ever read. My wife and I both enjoyed this book immensely, and it reads well. It is presented in good clear prose, and rings true with other accounts - my wife once transcribed texts from Holocaust survivors, and knows what sounds like real accounts. Dalager is an experienced writer, and this shows. There are a number of Holocaust survivor children's diaries, and you can feel that whilst this book is changing from one to another, each section was very real to the person who wrote the diaries used. The story begins with the start of restrictions on Jewish life, and advances to roundups, forced marches, the ghetto, and transportation. The ending is something you'll have to judge for yourself as to whether or not David makes it out alive. He certainly seems to be able to escape from earlier challenges, but the author has adapted the stories, so who knows which chapters were real happy endings, and which ended the way that so many tragedies did in those times. The atmosphere in David's village at the start shows the tipping point where Jews were suddenly no longer just neighbours, and became non-persons to be abused and ultimately murdered. The question one has to ask is: just how did their oppressors come to believe that anybody has the right to do what they did? In reality, this book reminds you that in the end, it was the Nazis who lost their humanity. Humans could not have treated children the way that these children were forced to suffer. Read this book, and if you didn't understand what I meant in the previous paragraph, you soon will... " *****- M. J. Jacobs, Amazon About the Author Stig Dalager is one of Denmark’s most distinguished authors whose novels and plays have been translated and staged internationally. His works include I count the hours, (staged in 12 countries), The Dream, (premiered in New York’s La Mama Theatre starring Ingmar Bergman and Bibi Andersson ); Two Days in July (a novel about the plot to kill Hitler), Journey in Blue, about Hans Christian Andersen (published in 15 countries and nominated for The Impac Prize 2008), The Labyrinth and Falling Shadows (about 9/11).
