Part of a new Holocaust remembrance series of important testimonies and memoirs from the unique collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. Anna Podgajecki was born in Korzec, on the Polish–Russian border. As life for the Jews became steadily worse, Anna’s parents insisted that she, the oldest of their seven children, try to escape, survive and report to the world on the atrocities that were taking place. For three years Anna lived in constant fear of discovery. She ...

With the Nazi invasion of Hungary underway, the German army was determined to round up as many Jews as they could and place them into concentration camps. “A Doctor in Auschwitz” is a harrowing tale of survival. It follows one Jewish doctor who was spared and forced to perform experiments on his fellow prisoners. This is a first-hand account of his often brutal assignments, sparing no details.With the Nazi invasion of Hungary underway, the German army was determined to round up as ...

A new, comprehensive exploration of the Gestapo from a renowned historian of the Third Reich.Drawing on a detailed examination of previously unpublished Gestapo case files this book relates the fascinating, vivid and disturbing accounts of a cross-section of ordinary and extraordinary people who opposed the Nazi regime. It also tells the equally disturbing stories of the involvement of the German citizenry in the Gestapo’s surveillance and reveals the cold-blooded,...

Born in Germany in 1936, three year old Susi Bechhofer and her twin sister Lotte were among thousands of children evacuated on the now famous Kindertransport as the country fell into the cruel grip of Nazism. Adopted by the Manns, a childless Welsh Baptist minister and his wife on their arrival in Britain, the two girls were given a new identity in an attempt to erase all traces of their previous existence: Susi and Lotte became Grace and Eunice. Only 50 years later did Susi begin ...

The memoirs of a man who saved thousands from the Nazi death camps.Although not as well-known as Raoul Wallenberg, Valdemar Langlet was the savior of thousands of Jews in Budapest in the last two years of World War II.Entirely without the permission or the financial support of the Swedish Red Cross, he issued so-called Letters of Protection,” which were passport-like documents with official-looking stamps that frequently saved Hungarian Jews from deportati...

‘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...

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its i...

The "never-before-published diaries, letters and personal accounts in [this] vital collection offer a devastating portrait of life in the Warsaw Ghetto" ( Publishers Weekly ).In the history of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto stands as the enduring symbol of Jewish suffering and heroism. This collective memoir—a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and accounts—follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardm...

The official little known WWII story of a desperate attempt to save Hungary's Jewish populationWhen Nazi troops invaded in March 1944, Hungary contained the largest intact Jewish population in Europe. Until then, stories of Auschwitz and other "resettlement camps" were still treated as unconfirmed rumors inside Hungary and among the Allied powers. With the arrival of Adolf Eichmann-and reports from the first escapees from Auschwitz confirming the most horrifying ru...

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and a...

The Next Chapter describes what it was like to live through the horrors of World War II in occupied Czechoslovakia, endure concentration and labor camps, and then try to resume a "normal" existence in a hostile and alien world.My mother's account emphasizes, however, that this is not a Holocaust book but rather an examination of reality under totalitarian oppression. She makes it a point of explaining that the Nazis were not only after the Jews—but wanted to exterminate all disside...

Thousands of people have been honored for saving Jews during the Holocaust -- but not a single Arab. Looking for a hopeful response to the plague of Holocaust denial sweeping across the Arab and Muslim worlds, Robert Satloff sets off on a quest to find the Arab hero whose story will change the way Arabs view Jews, themselves, and their own history.The story of the Holocaust's long reach into the Arab world is difficult to uncover, covered up by desert sands and desert politics. We ...