Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in World War II & Holocaust

Before she mastered the art of French cooking in midlife, Julia Child found herself working in the secrets trade in Asia during World War II. Single, six foot two, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America's first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture. The Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia's transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.

Set in India's remote Andaman Islands before and during WWII, the story revolves around a mysteriously mute four-year-old who vanishes on the eve of Japanese Occupation. Little Ty's parents, Shep and Claire, will go to any lengths to rescue him, but neither is prepared for the brutal and soul-changing odyssey that awaits them.

Having survived the sinking of his first ship, Ensign Ash Miller USNR is promoted and assigned to command one of the sleek new additions to "the splinter fleet", a 110-foot wooden submarine chaser armed with only understrength guns and depth charges. His task is to bring the ship swiftly into commission, weld his untried crew into an efficient fighting unit, and take his vessel to sea in order to protect the defenseless Allied merchant vessels which are being maliciously and increasingly sunk by German U-Boats, often within sight of the coast.

The liberation of occupied France is long overdue, but the operation requires the combined efforts of the resistance groups across Europe. Jeremy returns to France to prepare for the Allied invasion. An occupied country is a dangerous terrain to navigate, and as Jeremy works to set the plan in motion, even the smallest mistake can come at a fatal price. At Bletchley Park, Claire decodes a troubling message from German high command. Hitler is moving his secret weapons development resource from Norway to Bavaria.

The ideal of a new Germany swept up Sophie Scholl in a maelstrom of patriotic fervor - that is, until she realized the truth behind Hitler's machinations for the fatherland. Now she and other students in Munich, the cradle of the Nazi government, have banded together to form a group to fight for the truth: the White Rose. Risking everything to print and distribute leaflets calling for Germans to rise up against the evil permeating their country, the White Rose treads a knife's edge of discovery by the Gestapo.

Promoted within the British intelligence service, Paul is sent to Algiers during a ceasefire announced by French General Darlan. But when a deadly new assignment pushes his skills to the limit, will he step up to the challenge of his new role? At Bletchley Park, Claire and her team of analysts discern from decoded messages that the Germans have employed a new type of radar that is decimating RAF bombers. And the messages she decodes grow more troubling by the hour.

Irish domestic worker Norah King's decision to ask her wealthy employer, Caroline Parker, for an elegant red coat that the Beacon Hill matriarch has marked for donation ignites a series of events that neither woman could have fathomed. The unlikely exchange will impact their respective daughters and families for generations to come, from the coat's original owner, marriage-minded collegian Cordelia Parker, to the determined and spirited King sisters of South Boston, Rosemary, Kay, and Rita.

September 1939: The conquering Nazis swarm through Warsaw as social worker Irena Sendler watches in dread from her apartment window. Already, the city's poor go hungry. Irena wonders how she will continue to deliver food and supplies to those who need it most, including the forbidden Jews. The answer comes unexpectedly.

Zosia Lewandowska knows the brutal realities of war all too well. Within weeks of Germany's invasion of her Polish homeland, she lost the man she loves. As ghetto walls rise and the occupiers tighten their grip on the city of Krakow, Zosia joins pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz and his staff in the heart of the Krakow ghetto as they risk their lives to aid the Jewish people trapped by Nazi oppression.

Maria von Wedemeyer knows the realities of war. Her beloved father and brother have both been killed on the battlefield. The last thing this spirited young woman needs is to fall for a man under constant surveillance by the Gestapo. How can she give another piece of her heart to a man so likely to share the same final fate? Yet when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an old family friend, comes to comfort the von Wedemeyers after their losses, she discovers that love isn't always logical.

The Daughters of Marburg follows the story of two young women and their father who, shortly after the tyrannical November Pogroms, inhabit a home once owned by a Jewish family. While investigating their surroundings, Lilly, the main character, discovers a journal left by the Jewish girl who had fled the house with nothing but the clothes on her back. Through reading her entries, Lilly's eyes are opened to the brutality of the Nazi ideology.

1943, Seattle. While raging war reshapes the landscape of Europe, its impact is felt thousands of miles away too. Before the war, Nora Kinney was one of countless housewives and mothers in her comfortable Capitol Hill neighborhood. Now, with her doctor husband stationed in North Africa, Nora feels compelled to do more than tend her victory garden or help with scrap metal drives . . .

Berlin, 1948: World War II may be over, but a new era of conflict has begun. The Russians have cut off all access to the western part of Berlin in an attempt to seize it from the Allies. The thirst for power, dominance, and revenge is as strong as ever, and anti-Semitism is still rampant. When a store in West Berlin is vandalized with Swastikas, Sara Sturm, a German woman working for the US Department of Public Affairs, is dispatched to investigate, and meets Max and Karl Portnoy, two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

December, 1942. Conor Thorn will stop at nothing to end Hitler's terror. So when a brilliant nuclear physicist is discovered holed up in Italy, the elite OSS agent reunites with his MI6 counterpart and slips behind enemy lines on a recruitment mission. Now pitted against rival forces also on the hunt, Thorn is hell-bent on preventing the key to an atomic weapon from falling into ruthless Nazi hands. With the clock ticking on the escalating war, Thorn struggles to keep clear of an ever-tightening deadly trap. Can he deliver victory to the Allies before the world goes up in flames?

October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father - to live, at any cost - and to the moments he is able to spend in the company of Anna, imprisoned in the women's camp.

In the first months of 1936, Adolf Hitler risked everything by ordering his untrained military to reoccupy the Rhineland. It was a bluff. The Germans would have been forced to retreat if the French or British had offered the slightest opposition. But the bluff succeeded. History changed decisively. Hitler quieted the opposition at home, and marched the world relentlessly on, to the edge of destruction and beyond.

The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein's Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope.

When Stefan Jochum returns from England to Berlin in August 1945, it is to find a city counting the cost of the Second World War. The Hotel Quadriga is in ruins, his father is dead and his sister, Monika, is living in the Soviet-occupied zone. Determined to survive despite unconquerable odds, his mother Viktoria ekes out an existence from the cellar of the Cafe Jochum.

When grave misfortune leaves thirteen-year-old Terry Sayre without relatives to care for him in the summer of 1939, his only option to elude foster care is to accept asylum abroad with his mother's Danish kin, people he met only briefly as a child. Terry begins life anew in his grandparents' home, but within months of his arrival, the Second World War breaks out.

Two loves rule Viktoria Jochum-Kraus's life. One is the Hotel Quadriga, built by her father, opened on the day she was born and, in January 1933, the most luxurious hotel in Berlin. The other is her son, Stefan. Only Viktoria knows that Stefan is the result of a youthful infatuation with her husband's cousin, Count Peter von Biederstein. As war wreaks its fearful devastation—on the city and on the people she loves—all that Viktoria holds most dear is threatened....