Showing results for "The Survivors" in Europe

This is the story of No. 22483, who had been shipped from Belgium to Buchenwald. It records what he saw and felt during his calvary from Antwerp to the Malin distribution camp in France and from there to the extermination camp of Buchenwald. He was one of the few people who both entered a Nazi concentration camp and left again. This is his remarkable personal story that records his experiences of one of the most harrowing events in human history.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight.

In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.

An inspiring account from one of history’s darkest moments. Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. This is her story. As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

The Holocaust has no other comparison in the annals of human history because of the sheer extent of the terror it spread. In 1933 the population of Jews in Europe was about nine million. After Adolf Hitler came to power on a campaign of aggressive foreign policy, focus on domestic unification and the idea of racial superiority - nearly two thirds of the Jewish people in the continent had perished.

Dark skies and barbed wire fences were all Bluma Plaskovsky saw as she stepped down from the train onto the main platform of Auschwitz-Birkenau. After surviving the Wehrmacht’s decimation of her hometown, Bluma and what remained of her family were finally put on the long, harsh train ride through inhuman conditions that seemed to last an eternity.

Every so often, an event happens that yanks the reigns of the ever-churning machinery of time and stops the world in its tracks. The repercussions of such an event may send shock waves that can be felt in every nook and corner of our sphere. These events and happenings will vary in the actual magnitude, but their lasting effect can be immeasurable in the manner they influence humanity till posterity. One such event for instance, was the Holocaust.

It was a moment of mad impulse when John Humphrys decided to buy a semi-derelict cottage and a building site on a plot of land overlooking the Aegean. A few minutes gazing out over the most glorious bay he had ever seen was all it took to persuade him. After all, his son Christopher was already raising his family there so he would help build the beautiful villa that would soon take shape. What could possibly go wrong? Everything....

You're about to discover the acts of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and the effects it had on people of the generation. Every war waged, every triggered gun, every nuclear bomb dropped, and every genocide committed stand testimony to the statement that man brings about the destruction of his own race, whatever the underlying reason be behind such atrocious acts of violence.

When Jewish families were torn from their homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods, what happened to the animals that loved and depended on them? Here is a collection of never-before-told stories of pets during the Holocaust. Most of these accounts are told by men and women who were children during World War II in Europe. As they lost parents, siblings, and friends in the death camps, their beloved pets - dogs and cats - provided comfort and courage, gave them a connection to happier times, and helped them to never give up hope.

Relli, a Jewish girl in Poland, was denied a normal childhood. When Relli was just a baby, the Nazis occupied Poland and she, together with her parents, were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a way station before death. Her parents correctly assessed the new situation and decided to act heroically in order to save their only child. They succeeded in smuggling her out of the Ghetto and entrusted her to a Gentile Polish couple who agreed to hide her for the duration of the war under a false identity.

When the Nazis entered Poland in September 1939, Joseph lost his entire family and his Hevra. They were murdered because they were Jewish. At the young age of 17, he had to learn how to survive, all on his own. There was no escape possible. Joseph was transported to the worst places conceivable, first Majdanek, then Auschwitz, Dora and Bergen-Belsen. In these camps he experienced desperation, illness, starvation and unimaginable brutality.

We sighted the lights of the big steamer, the Carpathia. All the women got into a terrible commotion and jumped around. They were hallooing and the sailors were trying to keep them sitting down, and they would not do it. They were standing up all the time." (Daniel Buckley, a survivor of the Titanic)

June 1945. The immediate postwar period produces many shocks and revelations - some people have behaved better than Klemperer had believed, others much worse.

Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

Louis and Jenni Böhm were a middle-class Jewish couple who established a thriving business and raised a family in a small country town in Upper Silesia in 1885. The book follows the fortunes of the family over a period of 70 years, during which their peaceful and prosperous existence is gradually eroded as they are forced to suffer increasing humiliation and ostracisation under the Nazi regime imposed on pre-war Germany by Adolf Hitler.

Explore the captivating history of the Titanic. When thinking about the worst known maritime disaster in history, it is impossible not to think about all of the lives lost in a single night. One of the wealthiest men alive (and the wealthiest passenger aboard the ship) died in the same accident that took the life of a baby younger than five months old in steerage. More than 100 years after the disaster, the survivors have passed on, but they left behind harrowing stories that remind us that every day is something to appreciate.

60 years ago, as the German army continued its relentless advance across Europe; Britain, a country ill-prepared for war, faced its darkest hour...

Book two of the incredible stories and accounts of World War 2 women spies, heroes and informers! Clichéd though it may be, a human being's true strength of character is reflected in the most difficult of times. The world had to sit up and take note of just how strong a woman could be when the two world wars hit. This book chronicles the stories of four such women - Noor Inayat Khan, Krystyna Starbek, Virginia Hall, and Pearl Witherington - all of whom put their lives on the line for their countries.