Till First Morning Light is an autobiographical novel by a survivor of the Holocaust, the core of which is fact within a novelistic style. The story takes place in three countries - Hungary, Austria and Germany - during the years of Nazi rule. The story depicts a cross-section of Hungarian Jewry, whose bitter fate ended one year after the battle of Stalingrad and three months before the invasion of Normandy by the Allied forces. Lyrically told, the story moves forwards and backwards - associative and not chronological, the past and the present mixed together. The book expresses the meeting...

This memoir contains many fascinating vignettes about pre-war childhood in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, a child's-eye-view of the lost world of East European Jewry. It tells the tormented story of the Kovno ghetto as seen by a youngster whose father was a leading figure in the medical life of the ghetto. The author then recounts the long, harsh journey of entering the gates of Dante's Inferno into the whirlpool of the Holocaust - to Stutthof and Dachau - and moves on to describe his liberation. The author also provides a full and fascinating focus on the post-war years: recovery, organizing...

This is a personal account of a young boy's struggle to survive the Holocaust in Transnistria. The descriptions are presented against the background of unfolding events, combining personal recollections with a historic overview, before, during and after the Holocaust. The author was ten when Bessarabia and North Bucovina were invaded by the German and Romanian armies in July 1941. Interned with his mother in the Moghilev Ghetto, the author describes the daily struggle to survive, and the economic and medical support received from the remaining Jewish communities in Romania. The ghetto was...

Christine Winecki is a Holocaust child survivor. In her book she presents the story of her life, starting with the fond memories of her early childhood in south-eastern Poland, and then taking the reader through the turbulent years of the Second World War under Soviet and then German occupation. She depicts also the story of her future husband Oton - a survivor of a labor camp in Siberia - and their post-war life in Warsaw until the infamous events in 1968, which forced them to leave Poland and emigrate to Australia. Apart from its biographical content the book is rich in observations on the...

Survival in the Ukraine 1941-1944. Presents a child's experience of survival in the face of Nazi persecution.

Janina Fischler embarks on perhaps the most courageous of all her journeys to date. Forced to grow up quickly in a world which had no room for Jewish children - certainly not orphans - Janina displays a remarkable will to survive, a need to live, which shines through every one of her wartime experiences. Here, Janina recounts her escapades, posing as an Aryan orphan, moving from house to house and away from her beloved Cracow to the sometimes more anonymous countryside, always on the run from one thing that truly spelled terror. Striving to reveal the truth, but fighting with herself less she...

Here for the first time in the historiography of the Holocaust is the story of an international forced labour camp for women, the largest of the auxiliary women's camps attached to KZ Buchenwald in Germany. It was the place where the Jewish prisoners sang the satiric camp 'anthem': "Hasag is our father, the best father there is / He promises us - long years of happiness / In Leipzig - a paradise on earth." Was Hasag-Leipzig really a 'paradise' compared to other Nazi installations, in terms of the treatment of prisoners and their living conditions? This study provides answers to this...

The story of Willy Berler's Journey through Darkness opens with the attack on the 20th Belgian convoy from Mechelen to Auschwitz, an extraordinary act of resistance. His tale then relates the arrival at Monowitz, his fortuitous transfer to the main camp of Auschwitz, and the story of his friend's $100 which ultimately saved both their lives in Buchenwald. It tells of the executions at the Black Wall, which Willy Berler was forced to watch, and of the special commando of the SS Hygiene Institute of Rajsko, which has been relatively undocumented. Finally, it describes the death march, and Willy...