Ingeborg Hecht's father, a prosperous Jewish attorney, was divorced from his titled German wife in 1933--two years before the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws--and so was deprived of what these laws termed "privileged mixed matrimony." He died in Auschwitz. His two children, called "half-Jews," were stripped of their rights, prevented from earning a living, and forbidden to marry.
In "Invisible Walls, "Hecht writes of what it was like to live under these circumstances, sharing heartbreaking details of her personal life, including the loss of her daughter's father on the Russian front;...

Bread for the Departed details the experience of the Jewish community in Warsaw between 1940 and 1942; the final chapters take place during the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jewish community to death camps. Episodic, chaotic as the teeming ghetto itself, the novel records the inexorable breakdown of morals and loyalties that accompanied the physical deterioration of the ghetto population.

In 1939, Hertha Feiner sent her daughters Inge and Marion to Switzerland to escape the tightening Nazi vise in Berlin. "Before Deportation "compiles fifty-seven letters Feiner sent her to daughters between 1939 and 1942.
While Feiner was Jewish, her daughters' father, Johannes Asmus, was not, and was able to arrange for the daughters' transfer to a Swiss boarding school. Feiner's letters track her tireless efforts to maintain a bond with her children and to advise them as best she can under the circumstances. Her tone ranges from caring to authoritarian, from factual to sentimental, from...

Winner of 1998 Carl Sandburg Award

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932, Lala Weintraub grew up in Lvov, Poland. When the Nazis came, Lala--who had blond hair and blue eyes--survived by convincing them she was a Christian. This book tells her remarkable story.

Fiercely determined and greatly aided by her Aryan looks, she managed to convince everyone-German soldiers, interrogators, fellow Poles-that she was a Polish gentile. Within a year after the Germans captured Lvov, many of Lala's family members were missing and presumed dead. Lala's Story follows her as she...

This is and English-language publication of a Holocaust memoir with a strong American dimension. It tells the story of Robert Goldmann's youth in a small village in Germany, his experience in the early Nazi years in Frankfurt, his forced emigration in 1939, and his subsequent career in the United States, including service with the Voice of America, brushes with McCarthysim, and a brief tenure as head of the European bureau of the Anti-Defamation League.

These testimonies, submitted by individual authors and not originally intended for publication, were assembled as a historical record by the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland. While evil and brutal anti-Semitism are described, the accounts also reveal the great risks taken by courageous individuals in order to save Jewish children.

In Nazi-occupied Prague, ex-bank clerk Josef Roubick discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. When he begins to observe his new, increasingly skewed, and macabre environment with resigned detachment, his life becomes centered on survival and on the surprisingly small things he clings to in order to persevere.

Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, has received orders to remove from the roof of Prague's concert hall the statue of the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. But which of the figures adorning the roof is the Jew? Remembering his course on racial science, Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue they have carefully chosen begins to topple does he recognize that it is not Mendelssohn; it is Richard Wagner.

Thus begins a story of disarming simplicity that traces the transformation of ordinary lives in Nazi-occupied Prague. Death...

Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, "Medallions" stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature." More than mere historical record, "Medallions" offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.