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...

'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE' - OBSERVERIn May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.‘Stunning’ Sunday Times**‘A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power…...

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 ...

Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, (Die Welt von Gestern) is a unique love letter to the lost world of pre-war Europe The famous autobiography is published by Pushkin Press, with a cover designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell. Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of pre-war Europe its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall. Through the story of his life, and his relationships with ...

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...

Winner of the Costa Biography AwardWhat makes a Stalin? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin's bandit? Was he to blame for his wife's death? When did the killing start?Based on revelatory research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic cobbler's son became a student priest, romantic poet, prolific lover, gangster mastermind and murderous revolutionary. Culminating in the 1917 revolution, Simon Sebag Montefiore's bestselling biography radically alters ...

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...

An absolute classic of autobiography and history - one of the few books to explore how and why the Germans were seduced by Hitler and Nazism.'If you have never read a book about Nazi Germany before, or if you have already read a thousand, I would urge you to read DEFYING HITLER. It sings with wisdom and understanding' DAILY MAILSebastian Haffner was a non-Jewish German who emigrated to England in 1938. This memoir (written in 1939 but only published now for...

Ivan Grigoryevich walks free after thirty years in the Gulag, but freedom feels as strange and fragile as captivity did.Everything Flows follows Ivan as he returns to a country that has learned to survive through silence. Friends have compromised, neighbours have informed on each other, and even love has been shaped by fear.Haunted by prison camps and betrayal, Ivan struggles not only to find work or shelter, but to understand how ordinary people e...

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...