The book tells two complimentary stories about events at the end of World War II in Germany. Eva describes how her large Mennonite family flees from their farm in East Prussia, pursued by the Russian army, to settle in the west of Germany. In interesting detail, she describes the hardships and the kindness they received while trekking for two month in horse-drawn wagons through war-torn Germany, often slipping out of the Russian noose. Occasionally, she recounts memories of her childhood a...

How do you survive when you’re 11 years old and all your family have been taken from you and killed?How do you continue to live, when everything around you is designed to ensure certain death?Arek Hersh tells his story simply and honestly, a moving account of a little boy who made his own luck and survived. He takes us into the tragic world imposed on him that robbed him of his childhood.The depth of the tragedy, strength of courage and power of survival will move y...

The personal memoir of a Nazi soldier, from joining the German Army in 1941 through his time as a Panzer on the Eastern Front.Originally written only for his daughter, Armin Schedierbauer's Adventures in My Youth chronicles his time as a solider during World War II. As an infantry officer with the 252nd Infantry Division, German Army, Schedierbauer saw four years of combat on the Eastern Front.After joining his unit during the winter of 1942, he wa...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Why did I survive when so many others did not?'Otto was just nine years old when his family was captured in Berlin. All around him, Sinti and Roma families were being torn from their homes and broken up, many of them disappearing altogether.When Otto arrived in Auschwitz, he, as so many others, suffered unimaginable humiliation and suffering, and witnessed horrific violence and dehumanisation of his fe...

An unsentimental, fast-paced story of an eleven-year-old fending for himself during the World War II occupation of Holland. Fred describes the Battle of Arnhem raging overhead, near Gestapo misses, living in a chicken coop and an insane asylum, moving between 26 hiding places, and a mad dash across No Man's Land - all to stay out of Nazi hands. Fred's life-like reportage of his wartime memories touches veterans and modern day readers alike.

One German soldier's experience in the deadly crucible of World War II combat.Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Erwin fulfilled his dream on May Day 1941, when he walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw recruit. On arrival at the Eastern F...

Until seriously wounded in August 1944, when he was badly burned when his tank was hit and caught fire during fighting in southern Poland, Armin Böttger experienced the horrors of the Second World War on the Eastern Front from the perspective of a tank radio operator in the 24th Panzer Division. In this memoir he gives a full and honest account of his wartime career, encompassing both the hellish terror of combat and the everyday annoyances and injustices of army life in wartime.Bö...

A masterly and moving account of the most horrific hidden atrocity of World War II: Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp built for womenOn a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women—housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes—was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards.Their destinati...

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s acclaimed Holocaust memoir features new material by the author, a reading group guide, a map, and additional photographs. “The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what’s said and in what is left out.”—ALA Booklist (starred review)Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s r...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTIONWhat the hell kind of great escape is this? No one escapes!”-L.B. Mayer, on the 1963 filmHe had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film is The Great Escap...

A New Yorker staff writer investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in “a finely etched memoir with the powerful sweep of history” (David Grann, #1 bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon)“Fatherland maintains the momentum of the best mysteries and a commendable balance.”—The New York Times“Unflinching and illuminating . . . Bilger’s haunting memoir reminds us, the past is prologu...

A dramatic account of how the Nazis were driven out of Breslau, drawing on the words of those who witnessed it.In January 1945, the Red Army unleashed its long-awaited thrust into Germany with terrible fury. One by one the provinces and great cities of the German East were captured by the Soviet troops. Breslau, capital of Silesia, a city of 600,000 people, stood firm and was declared a fortress by Hitler.A bitter struggle raged as the Red Army encircled Br...