In this work, the author relates her experiences in Germany from her birth in 1926 to the start of a new life in the US after the World War II. Her father was a Jew, her mother a Christian, and although their marriage shocked some relatives, such "mixed marriages" were not uncommon in the 1920s. She had a happy early childhood, but with Hitler's rise to power, persecution of Jews, including "half Jews" like her, started immediately. Her mother rejected all Nazi pressure to divorce "the Jewish," and some of the non-Jews relatives gave the family loyal support. When her parents finally...

During the Nazi occupation of Belgium in 1942, Leah, aged three, and her older sister, Sylvia, aged seven, were hidden in a convent cellar. Their mother reassured Sylvia that at the end of the war she would be re-united with them. Sylvia had also been instructed to keep alive for both girls the spirit of what had been their joyful extended family, and their inherent Jewish background.

Peter Prager was born in Berlin and came to Britain via the "kindertransports." In The English Teacher from Berlin, he gives a fascinating, vivid account of life in Berlin before, during and after the war, as experienced by German Jews. His account of life once he arrived in Britain is told with sensitivity and humour, and includes hilarious stories from his early teaching career. Later, he makes a poignant return to Germany as an exchange teacher and reunites with contemporaries from his former Gymnasium, some of whom give their own short accounts.

Henryk Vogler's description of life wearing the Star of David armband in Poland is all the more tragic and frightening because after a half-century, the mistreatment of innocent humans has grown rather than diminished.

On Sunday, August 6, 1944, Maja and her mother and the woefully few remnants of the Jewish population of the town of Daugavpils in Latvia, were brought together on the docks of Riga. They were to be loaded into a boat for transport to the Stutthof death camp in Germany. But, miraculously, Maja and her mother did not die. After nearly nine months of desperate struggle against the most inhuman odds, they were liberated by advancing Russian troops on what - for most - turned out to be a final horrific death march. The story unfolds amidst the idyllic home life of a comfortable family, in the...

The Nazis and their collaborators murdered 1.5 million Jews in the Ukraine. But, for a long time the subject of the Holocaust was a forbidden subject not only in the USSR but throughout the socialist bloc. It has only recently become a respectable research topic. This is a collection of 86 personal testimonies from survivors of the Shoah in the Ukraine. The objective of the book is not to relate historical facts and data but to relate a story of the inhumane experiences of people who were destined to die but managed to survive. The idea for the book was stimulated by Zabarko's participation...

Klara Rosenfeld was born in 1924 in Lwow, Poland. This book chronicles her experiences of life under the Soviets, the German occupation, life in the ghetto, her rescue by an Italian soldier and her escape to a convent in Italy. After the war Klara was located by the Jewish Brigades and united with other Jewish survivors in a 'kibbutz' in Parma. In 1946 she joined more than a thousand survivors on the ship Antzo Sireney, bound for Palestine, but the ship was stopped by the British forces and the survivors were sent to prison camps in Atilt. After her release Klara chose to stay in Palestine,...

The astonishing, true story of a group of Jewish children who managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and survive in the Aryan section of the Nazi-occupied city. Sentenced to death, hounded at every step, they kept themselves alive by peddling cigarettes in Warsaw's Three Crosses Square - where the author, a member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, met and helped them and recorded their story. Several of the children were finally caught and killed, but most survived and are alive today. The story of the cigarette sellers has been published in Polish, Romanian, Hebrew and Yiddish,...

Ernest Levy, the youngest of eight, was born into a strong Orthodox family and achieved his Bar Mitzvah as Nazism reached into Czechoslovakia and expelled Jews of Hungarian origin back across the border. From there his story takes us through the war years, via Auschwitz, to the labor camps, from where, as the Russians closed in, inmates were force-marched to Belsen. Ernest survived Belsen and typhoid to choose repatriation. Finding himself back in Budapest, a crisis of faith, brought on by the hideous experiences of his teens, led him to flirt with communism. A revived faith and a passion for...

Henry Skorr shares his extraordinary story of his struggle to survive as a teenager during the Nazi occupation of Poland, his attempts to rescue others, and to maintain humanity in the face of unbelievable evil. He gives a fascinating account of Polish-Jewish life before the Second World War and a rare account of refugee life in the frozen Russian north. Henry Skorr s memoir will help to bring this forgotten history to public attention.