This is the true story of Nechama Tec, whose family found refuge with Polish Christians during the Holocaust. Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to "pass" in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is unique celebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust--or provide a more moving portrait of courage--than Oswald Rufeisen's. A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland, Rufeisen worked as translator for the German police--the very people who rounded up and murdered the Jews--and repeatedly risked his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. In this gripping biography, Nechama Tec, a widely acclaimed writer on the Holocaust, recounts Rufeisen's remarkable story.
A youth of seventeen when World War II began, Rufeisen joined the...

Everyone knows the name of Anne Frank but few people remember anything about the people who sheltered her. Who were the rescuers and what motivated them to risk their lives for persecuted Jews? Clearly such people deserve to be remembered and honored. And clearly an understanding of their motivations may help us cultivate such behavior in our own day.
Focusing on such "righteous Christians," Tec, herself a survivor helped by Poles, vividly recreates what it was like to pass and hide among Christians and what it was like for Poles to rescue Jews. Concentrating on Poland, the Nazi center...

In this riveting book Nechama Tec offers insights into the differences between the experiences of Jewish women and men during the Holocaust. Her research draws on a variety of sources: wartime diaries, postwar memoirs, a range of archival materials, and most important, direct interviews with Holocaust survivors. Tec reveals how women and men on the road to annihilation developed distinct coping strategies and how mutual cooperation and compassion operated across gender lines.
"Tec is able to paint a more nuanced picture of the realities of Jewish resistance than previous historians. . . ....

Author Richard Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew -- his father s mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard s father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn...

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II.

Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing...

Author Richard Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew -- his father s mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard s father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn...