In Fragments of Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life—from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi’s original illustrations and written in a tone as sharp and dry as that of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, Rossi’s vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in ...

Jacques Rossi is one of Stalin’s most well-known victims. Author of The Gulag Handbook, a fascinating encyclopedia of the Soviet forced labor camps, Rossi spent twenty years in interrogation, prison, and Gulag detention. Born to a prominent Polish father and French mother, the young Jacques became attracted to communism as a blueprint for radical social reform. He spent years in the communist underground in interwar Europe, agitating for the revolution, but he was arrested during ...

William & Rosalie is the gripping and heartfelt account of two young Jewish people from Poland who survive six different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the me...

**PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” —The New York Times**A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the CenturyThe Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentrat...

**How the Murder of More Than Two Million Jews Was Carried Out—In Broad DaylightBased on a decade of work by Father Patrick Desbois and his team at Yahad–In Unum that has culminated to date in interviews with more than 5,700 neighbors to the murdered Jews and visits to more than 2,700 extermination sites, many of them unmarked.One key finding: Genocide does not happen without the neighbors. The neighbors are instrumental to the crime.**In his National Jewish Book Aw...

Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague, 1937. In the back alleys of nighttime Europe, war is already under way. André Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars and a foreign correspondent for Pravda, is co-opted by the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and becomes a full-time spymaster in Paris. As deputy director of a Paris network, Szara finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not o...

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, this foundational work of Soviet history is Solzhenitsyn’s chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police and political repression that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ev...

“Captivating . . . [HHhH] has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction.” —James Wood, The New Yorker**The basis for the major motion picture, "The Man with the Iron Heart " available on streaming and home video.HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most lethal man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two exiled operatives, a Slovak an...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • LOS ANGELES TIMESBOOK PRIZE WINNEROne of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonf...

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovály (68,000 words and 8 photographs)"A story of the human spirit as its most indomitable... one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century." San Francisco Chronicle"Once in a rare while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our time and ourselves in perspective, making us confront the darker realities of human nature... Mrs. Kovaly experienced the ...

Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a combination of political savvy and cold-blooded brutality. He crushed the spirit of his own people while conquering half of Europe. What made the greatest murderer of the twentieth century tick?

The Gulag Archipelago was the name of the network of Soviet internment and punishment camps where millions of people were held during the second half of the 20th century. In this monumental document, Solzhenitsyn, who was confined in one of those camps, painstakingly reconstructs life inside the prison industry in Soviet times, and his dissection becomes a journey through fear, pain, cold, hunger and death, with which the totalitarian regime silenced all dissent.