Jo Langer and her husband Oscar were committed communists; she Hungarian, he Slovakian. During the Second World War the couple, both Jewish, escaped to America. Most members of their extended family were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, they returned to Czechoslovakia to help build communism. She worked for state exports in Bratislava; he was an economist working for the Central Committee. In 1951 Oscar Langer was arrested and detained as part of the anti-Semitic purge of the Comm...

He evaded death so many times it seemed it would never take him. The only man in history to go to Auschwitz as a volunteer, to form a resistance movement and document German atrocities. One of the few who succeeded in escaping. He sent drawings from there to his children and wrote letters to his wife, delivering them via the underground conspiracy along with reports. The British historian Michael Foot included him among the six most courageous people of the Second World War. After the war ...

Diane Armstrong's bestselling fictional debutA mother's silence, a village with a terrible secret, and an Australian woman who travels to Poland to uncover the truth ... When forensic dentist Halina Shore arrives in Nowa Kalwaria to take part in a war crimes investigation, she finds herself at the centre of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy. What she does not realise is that she has also embarked on a confronting personal journey. Inspired by a ...

A masterful novel dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending.The book begins in 1936, with Dmitri Shostakovich petrified at the age of thirty and fearing for his livelihood and even his life. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has just been denounced in Pravda in an article that certainly reflects the opinion of Joseph Stalin himself. Every night he...

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 two supreme hor...

‘Helen Lewis survived the greatest nightmare ever dreamed by man. Her story is appalling, mesmerising, and one reads with increasing gratitude for her clarity, honesty and courage.’ Ian McEwanHelen Lewis, a young student of dance in Prague at the outbreak of WW2 was herded, like Madeleine Albright, into the Terezin ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz, in 1942. Separated from her family, she struggled to survive amidst the carnage of The Final Solution. How she did so, and what she di...

**A Holocaust survivor reflects on his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and the hardships of being a postwar refugee, in this deeply moving memoir written with surprising wit and humor.“Weinberg’s graphic memories are haunting . . . an essential title for discussion.” —Booklist**In 1939, 12-year-old Felix Weinberg lost everything: hope, home, and even his own identity. Born into a respectable Czech family, Felix’s early years were idyllic. But when Nazi perse...

A controversial bestseller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: "a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight" (Los Angeles Times).**Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Ther...

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapsh...

Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Oliver Pretzel; 78,000 words and 15 photographs)Defying Hitler was written in 1939 and focuses on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, its author was a 25-year-old German law student, in training to join the German courts as a junior administrator. His book tries to answer two questions people have been asking since the end of World War II: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why d...

Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self by Melita Maschmann (translated from the German by Geoffrey Strachan, with a new introduction and an afterword by Marianne Schweitzer Burkenroad with Helen Epstein; 98,000 words, 10 photographs)Account Rendered was first published in Germany in 1963 as Fazit: Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch or Account Rendered: No attempt at justification. Maschmann wrote to Hannah Arendt that her intent in writin...

'Stands in the absolute first rank of books about the resistance in World War II. If you wish to read about a man more courageous and honourable than Jan Karski, I would have no idea who to recommend' Alan FurstIt is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the...