Showing results for "exile" in Military

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story. Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia’s grandmother’s deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her Aunt Zhenia's school protest, to her own parents’ flight from Ukraine when their town was occupied in 2022.

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing-room tickets to the Vienna State Opera. Hans never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique story in magnificent reportage.

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish-language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it.

In November 1942, as a part of Operation Torch, 33,000 American soldiers sailed undetected across the Atlantic and stormed the beaches of French Morocco. Seventy-four hours later, the Americans controlled the country and one of the most valuable wartime ports: Casablanca. In the years preceding, Casablanca had evolved from an exotic travel destination to a key military target after France's surrender to Germany. Jewish refugees from Europe poured in, hoping to obtain visas and passage to the United States and beyond.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany.

How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters – his mother and his two aunts – grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing ‘Aryan’ status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler’s regime and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.

Ready to unravel the complexities of one of history's most iconic military leaders? Curious about the rise and fall of a man who shaped the face of Europe? Fascinated by the blend of genius, ambition, and hubris that defines a legendary emperor? A Brief History of Napoleon Bonaparte dives deep into the life of the man who rose from Corsican obscurity to become the Emperor of the French. This book is more than a biography; it's a vivid narrative of power, conquest, and downfall.

Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees—the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before immigrating to New York.

July 13, 1938: The renowned nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, approaching the age of 60, sits on the train that will take her to the German-Dutch border and then to the safety of exile in Sweden. After months of uncertainty and fear, as a Jew in Nazi Germany, she has abandoned everything: her friends, her career, and her beloved adopted home, the city of Berlin, where she had become a pioneer in the world of nuclear physics.

Though Napoleon’s unquenchable thirst for military adventurism eventually cost him both his throne and his freedom during the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the French emperor was not easily defeated even when most of Europe's nations united against him. In 1812, Napoleon's Russian adventure gutted his veteran army, depriving him of the majority of his finest and most loyal soldiers. Those who remained formed the hard core of his new armies, but the Russian fiasco damaged their health and embittered their previously unquestioning loyalty.