Just some recent books selected from dozens upon dozens that may interest you. (click on a listing to learn more, add a review, or purchase it for up to 50% off, tax free) We also sell NYT Best Sellers for 50% off!

Holocaust Restitution
Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy
Now in Paperback
Edited by Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford
JUNE 2007. New York Univerity Press
Holocaust Restitution is the first volume to present the Holocaust restitution movement directly from the viewpoints of the various parties involved in the campaigns and settlements. Now that the Holocaust restitution claims are closed, this work enjoys the benefits of hindsight to provide a definitive assessment of the movement. From lawyers and state department officials to survivors and heads of key institutes involved in the negotiations, the volume brings together the central players in the Holocaust restitution movement, both pro and con. The volume examines the claims against European banks and against Germany and Austria relating to forced labor, insurance claims, and looted art claims. It considers their significance, their legacy, and the moral issues involved in seeking and receiving restitution. Contributors: Roland Bank, Michael Berenbaum, Lee Boyd, Thomas Buergenthal, Monica S. Dugot, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Eric Freedman and Richard Weisberg, Si Frumkin, Peter Hayes, Kai Henning, Roman Kent, Lawrence Kill and Linda Gerstel, Edward R. Korman, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, David A. Lash and Mitchell A. Kamin, Hannah Lessing and Fiorentina Azizi, Burt Neuborne, Owen C. Pell, Morris Ratner and Caryn Becker, Shimon Samuels, E. Randol Schoenberg, William Z. Slany, Howard N. Spiegler, Deborah Sturman, Robert A. Swift, Gideon Taylor, Lothar Ulsamer, Melvyn I. Weiss, Roger M. Witten, Sidney Zabludoff, and Arie Zuckerman. Click the book cover to read more.








The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology
Now in Paperback
Edited by Steven T. Katz, Boston University
JUNE 2007. New York Univerity Press
The theological problems facing those trying to respond to the Holocaust remain monumental. Both Jewish and Christian post-Auschwitz religious thought must grapple with profound questions, from how God allowed it to happen to the nature of evil. The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology brings together a distinguished international array of senior scholars--many of whose work is available here in English for the first time--to consider key topics from the meaning of divine providence to questions of redemption to the link between the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Together, they push our thinking further about how our belief in God has changed in the wake of the Holocaust. Contributors include Yosef Achituv, Yehoyada Amir, Ester Farbstein, Gershon Greenberg, Warren Zev Harvey, Tova Ilan, Shmuel Jakobovits, Dan Michman, David Novak, Shalom Ratzabi, Michael Rosenak, Shalom Rosenberg, Eliezer Schweid, and Joseph A. Turner. Click the book cover to read more.








THE JEWS OF MUSSOLINI'S ITALY
FROM EQUALITY TO PERSECUTION
BY MICHELLE SARFATTI
FEB 2007. University of Wisconsin Press
From Booklist: In the first English edition of a history of the Italian Jews from the rise of Fascism to power in 1922 to its ultimate defeat in 1945, the author points out that from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth, the Jews had been masters of their own destiny, having spread throughout the country, moving especially to the larger and more modern cities. They numbered 1 out of 1,000 in the total population. In 1938 Benito Mussolini deprived the Jews of their rights and livelihood and tried to drive them from the peninsula. In 1943, when the defeat of the Axis seemed certain, he began to arrest them and collaborated with his German ally in their near annihilation. Thus, the history of the Italian Jews between 1922 and 1945, Sarfatti writes, was progressively less the story of Jewish historical developments and increasingly an account of their treatment by society and the government. This rich and compassionate study of the plight of Italy's Jews combines vivid narrative with scrupulous historical accuracy. Click the book cover to read more.






The Kommandant's Girl
A novel (Paperback)
by Pam Jenoff
March 2007. Mira
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. With luminous simplicity, Jenoff's breathtaking debut chronicles the life of a young Jewish bride during the Nazi occupation of Kraków, Poland, in WWII. Emma Bau, a shy librarian, escapes the city's Jewish ghetto with the aid of the underground resistance movement that Jacob, her activist husband, has already joined. Emma assumes a new gentile identity as Anna Lipowski and goes to live with Jacob's elderly aunt, a wealthy Catholic widow who has also taken in Lukasz Izakowicz, the only surviving child of a famous rabbi and his murdered wife. As Anna, Emma catches the eye of Kommandant Georg Richwalder, second in charge of the General Government, at a dinner party. The handsome Nazi is so impressed by her German language skills (and her beauty) that he asks her to become his personal assistant. Emma accepts, hoping to secure valuable information for the resistance, but the chemistry between them presents challenges that test her loyalties to Jacob and her heart. This is historical romance at its finest. Click the book cover to read more.








UNCOVERING THE HOLOCAUST
THE INTERNATIONAL RECEPTION of NIGHT AND FOG
EDITED BY EWOUT VAN DER KNAAP, Utrecht
March 2007. Columbia
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) was released in France in 1956 by Alain Resnais. Now, 50 years later, this book examines how it represented the Holocaust and how it was received worldwide. Click the book cover to read more.








Oh good... move over Mel Brooks.. a comic novel on the Holocaust... But seriously, this is a great book which is a satire on those who abuse the Holocaust and "Shoah Business" and the cult of competitive one up-man-ship of victimization
My Holocaust
A Novel
by Tova Reich
April 2007. HarperCollins
Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman's daughter and Maurice's granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda. Father and son embark on a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which Maurice-now the driving force behind the most powerful Holocaust memorialization institution in America-organizes to soften up a potential major donor, and which Norman takes advantage of to embark on a surrealistic search for his daughter. At the death camp they run into assorted groups and individuals all clamoring for a piece of the Holocaust, including Buddhist New Agers on a retreat, Israeli schoolchildren on a required heritage pilgrimage, a Holocaust artifact hustler, filmmakers, and an astonishing collection of others. All hell breaks loose when Maurice's museum is taken over by a coalition of self-styled victims seeking Holocaust status, bringing together a vivid cast of all-too-human characters, from Holocaust professionals to Holocaust wannabees of every persuasion, in the fevered competition to win the grand prize of owning the Holocaust. An inspiringly courageous and shockingly original tour-de-force, My Holocaust dares to penetrate territory until now considered sacrosanct in its brilliantly provocative and darkly comic exploration of the uses and abuses of memory and the meaning of human suffering. Click on the book cover to read more.








The Diary of Petr Ginz
Edited by Chava Pressburger, Translated by Elena Lappin
APRIL 2007. Atlantic Monthly Press
Ages 9-12
Lost for sixty years in a Prague attic, this secret diary of a teenage prodigy killed at Auschwitz is an extraordinary literary discovery, an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny. As a fourteen-year old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully records the increasingly precarious texture of daily life. With a child's keen eye for the absurd and the tragic, he muses on the prank he played on his science class and then just pages later, reveals that his cousins have been called to relinquish all their possessions, having been summoned east in the next transport. The diary ends with Petr's own summons to Thereisenstadt, where he would become the driving force behind the secret newspaper Vedem, and where he would continue to draw, paint, write, and read, furiously educating himself for a future he would never see. Fortunately, Petr's voice lives on in his diary, a fresh, startling, and invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life. Click the book cover to read more.








The Diary of Mary Berg
Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Mary Berg
Edited by S L Schneiderman
Intro by Susan Lee Pentlin, trans by Norbert Gutterman and Sylvia Glass
April 2007. Oneworld-Publications.com
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Today I am fifteen years old. I feel very old and lonely.... Everyone is afraid to go out. The Germans are here." So begins this extraordinary memoir of Jewish life in Lodz, Poland, and the Warsaw ghetto as the Nazis began to liquidate its starving and disease-ridden inmates. In 1940 Berg fled Lodz with her parents and sister. They lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and in July 1942 were transferred to Pawiak prison within the ghetto. Originally published in the U.S. in February 1945, the memoir is based on notebooks that Mary Berg (née Wattenberg) smuggled out of Europe when she and her interned family were traded for German prisoners and sailed to America. This powerful testament documents Nazi brutalities, and the difference between those without means, who starved and died of typhus, and the more privileged, like Berg's family (her mother was American and her father relatively wealthy), who, for a time, were able to patronize ghetto cafes and attend the theater. Berg is a remarkably clear-eyed, skillful and heart-breaking recorder of those terrible years. Click the book cover to read more.








SAVING THE JEWS
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE HOLOCAUST
By ROBERT n. ROSEN, Forword by Gerhard Weinberg, Afterword by Alan M. Dershowitz
Now in PAPERBACK
April 2007. Thunders Mouth
From Publishers Weekly: Was FDR an indifferent or possibly anti-Semitic president who abandoned European Jews, or was he a pragmatic leader who understood that the key to saving the Jews was winning WWII as swiftly as possible? This bloated, repetitious volume reads like one long apology as it takes on the so-called "revisionist" historians who question FDR's good will; it concludes that he should be "honored for [his] actions during World War II, not defamed." According to Rosen (The Jewish Confederates), FDR may have told ethnic jokes about Jews, but he also surrounded himself with Jewish friends and advisers like Henry Morgenthau Jr. FDR didn't have the political clout to change American immigration laws, and two-thirds of the refugees on the SS St. Louis, who were refused entry to the U.S. in 1939, are believed to have survived the war. Roosevelt probably didn't know about requests by various Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz, an action that, Rosen says would have killed Anne Frank and other innocents. Although Rosen is able to debunk some of the more overheated claims put forth four decades ago by Arthur Morse in While Six Million Died, his often simplistic arguments don't undo landmark works like David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews. Click the book cover to read more.








A Political Education
Coming of Age in Paris and New York
by Andre Schiffrin
March 21, 2007. Melville House
Andre Schiffrin's father was one of France's most important publishers, discovering Andre Gide and others. But the family had to flee Nazi-occupied Paris. They landed in New York, along with friends including Hannah Arendt and visitors such as Sartre. By the time Andre went to college, he felt more American than French. But family history left him unable to idly watch the rise of the American Right under Senator Joseph McCarthy. At Yale, he became a radicalized leftist, joining a student political group he -renamed Students for a Democratic Society-the SDS. Continuing his education at Cambridge, he befriended some of England's greatest publishers and discovered ways to channel his political interests through publishing. This absorbing saga about a tumultuous period is told from a unique perspective, encompassing both sides of the Atlantic and some of the leading figures of the day. It is also a fascinating glimpse into the development of a celebrated publisher and a passionate testament to the importance of books as a force for betterment. Click the book cover to read more.








My Father's Secret War
A Memoir
by Lucinda Franks
March 2007. Mir a Max Books
From Publishers Weekly: One day, while trying to straighten up her elderly father's apartment, Franks discovered Nazi military paraphernalia, inspiring the Pulitzer-winning reporter and novelist (Wild Apples) to investigate what he really did during the Second World War. The painstaking inquiries are hampered by his reluctance to discuss his work in military intelligence, attached to the navy's Bureau of Ordnance. Some of that reluctance may have to do with the onset of dementia tearing away his memories, but he's also profoundly traumatized by some of his missions. In one moving passage, he is persuaded to describe his experience as one of the first American observers at a liberated concentration camp, every sentence still painful to get out even 50 years later. As Franks perseveres with her questions, she begins to understand how those experiences shaped their disintegrating postwar family life, but she acknowledges how difficult it is to achieve closure with this past, especially when she's afraid to confront the reality of his present condition. Even the most painful moments-as when she throws a particularly harrowing revelation back in her father's face to score revenge for adolescent resentments-are recounted with unflinching honesty as the military history takes a backseat to the powerful family drama.
The author is the wife of Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau. Book Description: In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado -- posing as a Nazi guard, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and being flown to one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies to report on the atrocities found there.
My Father's Secret War is an intimate account of Franks coming to know her own father after years of estrangement. Looking back at letters he had written her mother in the early days of WWII, Franks glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Franks learns about him -- beyond the alcoholism and adultery -- and comes to know the man he once was. Her story is haunting, and beautifully told, even as the tragedy becomes clear: Franks finally comes to know her father, but only as he is slipping further into his illness. Lucinda Franks understands her father as the disease claims him. My Father's Secret War is a triumph of love over secrets, and a tribute to the power of the connection of family Click the book cover to read more.








THE PARIS PRESS LOVES THIS BOOK SO MUCH, IT IS THE ONLY BOOK THEY WILL PUBLISH THIS SEASON, so that they can focus solely on it Let's help them out!
By the way, this book's cover art is by Charlotte Solomon who was murdered in Auschwitz.
Tell Me Another Morning
An Autobiographical Novel
by Zdena Berger
April 1, 2007. Paris Press
WHEN THIS WAS first published in 1961, it was a sensation. But was overshadowed by Elie Wiesel's NIGHT. BUT WITH THE success of SUITE FRANCAISE, NIGHT, THE BOOK THIEF, and more, it is time for a reisssue of this classic
This autobiographical novel depicts a 14 year old teenage girl's experience in the Nazi concentration camps. As in The Diary of Anne Frank, Tania's youthful concerns are interwoven among accounts of extremity: her brother's murder, her mother's choice to stay with her father and die in the gas chamber rather than be transported to another camp, the saving friendships Tania develops, her relationships with young men and the guards. Throughout the novel we see claustrophobic uncertainty, grief, terror, exhaustion, and Tania's sustaining hope. Her return to Prague after the war is unforgettable and devastating, as she observes people wearing "normal" clothes, eating ice cream, and traveling on buses between work and home. There is no judgment, only the reality of two worlds existing simultaneously. Zdena Berger was born in 1925 in Prague, where she lived until the Nazi occupation. She spent the war years as a prisoner of Terezin, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. She was imprisoned at 16 and freed at 20. After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Berger returned to Prague to complete her education, and then lived in Paris for nearly a decade. She immigrated to San Francisco in 1955 and now lives with her husband in the Bay Area. Tell Me Another Morning is her only book. Click the book cover to read more.








The Years of Extermination
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
By Saul Friedlander (UCLA)
April 10, 2007. HarperCollins
848 Pages
With The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer completes his major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The enactment of German extermination policies and measures depended on the cooperation of local authorities, the assistance of police forces, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. This implementation depended as well on the victims' readiness to submit to orders, often with the hope of attenuating them or of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. This multifaceted study-at all levels and in different places-enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices-mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs-Saul Friedländer avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. In this work, the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
Click the book cover to read more.

Also... see his first volume:
Nazi Germany and the Jews
Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
by Saul Friedlander
July 2007, paperback edition
Weidenfeld & Nicholson







Holocaust Odysseys
The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Their Flight through France and Italy
by Susan Zuccotti
May 2007. Yale
From Publishers Weekly: Occupied by Italy in 1943, the southern French town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie served as a haven for Jews from all over Europe. But after Italy's armistice with the Allies, the Italians left the town and many Jews crossed the Alps into Italy, seeking further refuge, only to find themselves face-to-face with the Germans; many were deported to Auschwitz. Zuccotti describes the remarkable scene of the Fremch town square in the summer of 1943 filled with Yiddish-speaking Jews, and reports both positive and tense relations between the refugees and their hosts. Zuccotti (The Italians and the Holocaust) explores these events through the dramatic stories of nine Jewish families, tracing their flight across the continent. These incredible stories demonstrate the perseverance and luck involved in surviving the Holocaust: one man survived as a boy by jumping a fence the night before a deportation and yelling to a passerby to catch him. Other stories come to a chilling end. While relying on oral histories of survivors of these events, Zuccotti probes the strengths and limitations of that form. Supplementing their memories with historical documentation and context, she helps turn painful memories into valuable history. Click the book cover to read more.






CARL SCHMITT AND THE JEWS
THE "JEWISH QUESTION," THE HOLOCAUST, AND GERMAN LEGAL THEORY
BY RAPHAEL GROSS, Leo Baeck Institue
JULY 2007. University of Wisconsin Press
A reexamination of Carl Schmitt, his life, the antisemitism that was at the core of his work, his writings in which the Jew was the adversary, and how he influenced Nazi and Nazi Legal thought and policies. Click the book cover to read more.








The Warsaw Ghetto
A Guide to the Perished City
by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak
July 2007. Yale
The establishment and liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto has become an icon of the Holocaust experience. Remarkably, a full history of the Ghetto has never been written, despite the publication over some sixty years of numerous memoirs, studies, biographical accounts, and primary documents. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City is this history, researched and written with painstaking care and devotion over many years and now published for the first time in English. The authors explore the history of the ghetto's evolution, the actual daily experience of its thousands of inhabitants from its creation in 1941 to its liquidation following the uprising of 1943. Encyclopedic in scope, the book encompasses a range of topics from food supplies to education, religious activities to the Jundenrat's administration. Separate chapters deal with the mass deportations to Treblinka and the famous uprising. A series of original maps, along with biographies, a glossary, and a bibliography, completes this masterful work . Click the book cover to read more.








REMEMBERING:
VOICES OF THE HOLOCAUST
A NEW HISTORY IN THE WORDS OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO SURVIVED
By LYN SMITH
Now in PAPERBACK
February 2007. Carroll and Graf
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review: Elie Wiesel's Night may be topping bestseller lists, thanks to Oprah's book club, but there is still a need for other testimonies to the horrors of the Holocaust. Smith, who has recorded the experiences of survivors for London's Imperial War Museum, weaves together more than 100 accounts to construct a narrative of Nazi persecutions from the first anti-Semitic measures in 1933 through the liberation of the concentration camps. Atrocities, cruelties and random acts of kindness are recounted, fueled by a fierce need to preserve the truth for future generations. The strength of this collection is deepened by the inclusion of the experiences of Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, members of German police battalions and resistance fighters. The most horrific anecdotes evoke the suffering of German, Polish and Czech Jews in overcrowded ghettos and extermination centers, somehow managing to outwit and, against all odds, overcome the final solution by luck and their persistent will to live. This is an extraordinary work of scholarship and a reminder of the power of individual stories, which can bring home the horrors of WWII more forcefully than abstract numbers. Click the book cover to read more.






Killing Hitler
The Plots, The Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death
by Roger Moorhouse
March 2007. Bantam
From Publishers Weekly: Although Hitler took his own life, there was no shortage of people who wanted, and attempted, to do it for him throughout his political career. Drawing on newly opened archives in Germany and elsewhere, British historian Moorhouse (Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City) casts a wide net, chronicling failed assassination attempts by disaffected individuals in the early days of Hitler's reign, such as radical university student Maurice Bavaud, whose three easily thwarted tries in November 1938 got him guillotined; the efforts of a British group of James Bond-like spies armed with, among other things, "exploding rats"; and the well-known attempts of German officers, such as Hitler's architect Albert Speer. Moorhouse also brings to light little-known would-be-assassins, such as members of the Polish underground. Most of the assassination attempts Moorhouse describes failed because of poor planning; others fell victim to circumstance, while some may simply have been rumors, making for a compelling web of research, intrigue and conspiracy theory. Accessible prose, suspenseful narration and ample historical context make this a page-turner for WWII buffs as well as anyone with a passion for the underbelly of political power in one of the last century's darkest regimes. Click the book cover to read more.








Holy Week
A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
by Jerzy Andrzejewski with Intro by Jan Gross and Oscar E. Swan
January 2007, Ohio University Press.
From Publishers Weekly: As armed battle rages in the Warsaw ghetto during the week preceding Easter of 1943, Jan Malecki, a Polish architect and cold, indecisive leftist, reluctantly takes in his Jewish old flame, Irena Lilien. Irena was a wealthy, bewitching beauty, but is now an embittered homeless fugitive with forged Aryan papers. Jan's pious and pregnant wife, Anna, is kind if condescending to Irena, and Jan's revolutionary brother identifies with the Jewish insurgents. But Irena, almost raped by a neighbor, is informed on by the neighbor's acidly anti-Semitic wife. Outside on the street, Polish children flush an emaciated Jewish boy out of hiding, chasing him into the grip of a German soldier who shoots him dead, and curious bystanders vie for a glimpse of the bloodletting inside the walls of the burning ghetto. Andrzejewski (1909-1983) writes blocky characters, and the translation, much of which was done by students of University of Pittsburgh professor Swan, is awkward. But the book, first published in 1945, remains a landmark for its scathing indictment of everyday Warsaw's savage indifference to the plight of Jews during WWII. Click the book cover to read more.






BEYOND ANNE FRANK
HIDDEN CHILDREN AND POSTWAR FAMILIES IN HOLLAND
BY DIANE L. WOLF
January 2007, University of California Press.
The image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis was shaped by Anne Frank, whose house--the most visited site in the Netherlands-- has become a shrine to the Holocaust. Yet while Anne Frank's story continues to be discussed and analyzed, her experience as a hidden child in wartime Holland is anomalous--as this book brilliantly demonstrates. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Diane L. Wolf paints a compelling portrait of Holocaust survivors whose experiences were often diametrically opposed to the experiences of those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, leading many of those interviewed here to remark, "My war began after the war." This first in-depth examination of hidden children vividly brings to life their experiences before, during, and after hiding and analyzes the shifting identities, memories, and family dynamics that marked their lives from childhood through advanced age. Wolf also uncovers anti-Semitism in the policies and practices of the Dutch state and the general population, which historically have been portrayed as relatively benevolent toward Jewish residents. The poignant family histories in Beyond Anne Frank demonstrate that we can understand the Holocaust more deeply by focusing on postwar lives.. Click the book cover to read more.






Hitler's Beneficiaries
Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State
by Gotz Aly
Metropolitan Books (January 9, 2007).
In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history's greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale-and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs-Hitler literally "bought" his people's consent. Drawing on secret files and financial records, Aly shows that while Jews and citizens of occupied lands suffered crippling taxation, mass looting, enslavement, and destruction, most Germans enjoyed an improved standard of living. Buoyed by millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of conquered territory and the transfer of Jewish possessions into their homes and pockets. Any qualms were swept away by waves of government handouts, tax breaks, and preferential legislation. Click the book cover to read more.






A Jewish Doctor in Auschwitz
The Testimony of Sima Vaisman
by Sima Vaisman
(April 2005)
Written just days after her liberation but not discovered by her family until 50 years later, this riveting manuscript by Sima Vaisman, a Jew who suffered the worst of Nazi persecution, first fleeing the Nazis as they invaded her native Poland, then escaping to Paris only to be arrested and deported to Auschwitz, is her story of being a doctor forced to work in the hospital run by the infamous "Angel of Death," Dr. Josef Mengele. Told in detached, clinical language that holds nothing back, this gripping memoir provides key information and chilling details about how the infamous death camps worked-revealing, for example, how the lethal gas was actually administered by two Nazis in early-version chemical suits in the death chambers. Vaisman also shares the details of her liberation when the camp was captured by the Russian army, as well as her return to Paris, where she subsequently said little about her testimony until her family discovered it. Her story is supplemented by a moving foreword by famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who gives her account a full historical context. The author's cousin, famed fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, herself the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, provides a moving afterword that gives a stirring portrait of the Vaisman she knew. Click the book cover above to read more.






Auschwitz Report
by Primo Levi, Leonardo Debenedetti
October 2006. Norton
From Publishers Weekly: First published in Italy in 1946, this newly rediscovered early work by the celebrated late author of such Holocaust memoirs as Survival in Auschwitz-an eyewitness account of conditions at Buna-Monowitz, a satellite camp of Auschwitz-appears in English for the first time. The short report was written for the Russian authorities who had liberated the camp and were gathering information on German war crimes. While the report is not exactly a curiosity-one of the first written by eyewitnesses, it has an important place in Holocaust historiography-it contains little new information. Some of what it does contain-for instance, the authors thought the Sonderkommandos were criminal inmates rather than Jews-we now know to be inaccurate. Despite this, the publication of the document gives readers, and especially Holocaust scholars, new insights into Levi's work. An excellent introduction by editor Gordon gives an astute overview of the stylistic and historical relationship between this work and Levi's later autobiographical writings. Levi's training as a chemist and his friend and fellow survivor De Benedetti's training as a physician bring to the piece a dispassionate tone that has, in a sense, prefigured the best writing about the Holocaust. This is an important addition to Holocaust literature, but probably of limited interest to the general reader. . Click the book cover to read more.






Auschwitz
A New History
by Laurence Rees
2005
Pw writes: This pathbreaking work reveals the "destructive dynamism" of the Nazis' most notorious death camp. Rees, creative director of history programs for the BBC, consistently offers new insights, drawn from more than 100 interviews with survivors and Nazi perpetrators. He gives a vivid portrait of the behind-the-scenes workings of the camp: for instance, of how a sympathetic guard could mean the difference between life and death for inmates, and the opening of a brothel to satisfy the "needs" of sadistic camp guards. But this is more than an anecdotal account of Nazi brutality. Rees also examines, and takes a stand on, controversial issues: he argues, for instance, that bombing the camp's train tracks wouldn't have saved many Jews. Nor does he overlook stories of individual acts of kindness or the Danes' rescue of their Jewish community. Rees (The Nazis: A Warning from History) gives a complete history of the camp-how it was turned over time from a concentration camp into a death factory where 10,000 people were killed in a single day. Indeed, his argument for incrementalism at Auschwitz mirrors his larger claim that the "Final Solution" came about in an ad hoc fashion, as top Nazi officials struggled for a way to implement their virulent anti-Semitism. Some scholars have made this argument, and others reject it, but the depth and wealth of detail Rees provides make this treatment highly compelling. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. FYI: This book is the companion to a documentary that PBS will air in three two-hour segments, on January 19, January 26 and February , 2005. Click the book cover above to read more.






Cezanne Is Missing
by Frank McMillan
Cambridge House, 2006
In the months following the atrocious events of September 11, a 15-year-old girl learns the story of her art teacher, a suvivor of Auschwitz and a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance. After frantic attempts to decode a diary written by her teacher's long-lost brother during World War II, she is suddenly drawn into the dangerous network of the underworld kidnappers who have targeted her teacher. Utterly clueless about this terrible epoch in history, she begins to see the link between hatred and intolerance throughout history. Set in New York City, the fast-paced, original plot is both educational and compelling Click the book cover above to read more.






Our Holocaust
A novel
by Amir Gutfreund, Jessica Cohen
Toby Press, 2006
From Booklist Eloquently translated from the Hebrew, and written by the child of Holocaust survivors, this haunting first novel, a prizewinner in Israel, brings the history very close now. Why the panic when someone knocks at the door? Why does crazy Uncle Hirsch ask obsessively, "Only saints were gassed?" Always there is the dark humor of the old folks' grudges, miserliness, and daily lunacy. The kids are forbidden to ask about past secrets, but when they are "Old Enough," they hear the horrific memories in graphic detail. The spare accounts of unspeakable brutality, suffering, and sacrifice stay with you, and so do the big questions. The savagery of Nazi criminals is documented; why have so many never been punished? And what about the officials who were only doing their jobs? As the narrator fetches his kid from kindergarten today, he wonders about the people on the street: Who could be collaborator, informer, loyal soldier, killer, rescuer? With the arbitrariness of the survival stories, there is the inescapable truth that ordinary people made it happen. Click the book cover above to read more.






Holocaust Justice
The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts
by Michael J. Bazyler
NYU Press, 2005
The Holocaust was not only the greatest murder in history; it was also the greatest theft. Historians estimate that the Nazis stole roughly $230 billion to $320 billion in assets (figured in today's dollars), from the Jews of Europe. Since the revelations concerning the wartime activities of the Swiss banks first broke in the late 1990s, an ever-widening circle of complicity and wrongdoing against Jews and other victims has emerged in the course of lawsuits waged by American lawyers. These suits involved German corporations, French and Austrian banks, European insurance companies, and double thefts of art--first by the Nazis, and then by museums and private collectors refusing to give them up. All of these injustices have come to light thanks to the American legal system. Holocaust Justice is the first book to tell the complete story of the legal campaign, conducted mainly on American soil, to address these injustices. Michael Bazyler, a legal scholar specializing in human rights and international law, takes an in-depth look at the series of lawsuits that gave rise to a coherent campaign to right historical wrongs. Diplomacy, individual pleas for justice by Holocaust survivors and various Jewish organizations for the last fifty years, and even suits in foreign courts, had not worked. It was only with the intervention of the American courts that elderly Holocaust survivors and millions of other wartime victims throughout the world were awarded compensation, and equally important, acknowledgment of the crimes committed against them. The unique features of the American system of justice--which allowed it to handle claims that originated over fifty years ago and in another part of the world--made it the only forum in the world where Holocaust claims could be heard. Without the lawsuits brought by American lawyers, Bazyler asserts, the claims of the elderly survivors and their heirs would continue to be ignored. For the first time in history, European and even American corporations are now being forced to pay restitution for war crimes totaling billions of dollars to Holocaust survivors and other victims. Bazyler deftly tells the unfolding stories: the Swiss banks' attempt to hide dormant bank accounts belonging to Holocaust survivors or heirs of those who perished in the war; German private companies that used slave laborers during World War II--including American subsidiaries in Germany; Italian, Swiss and German insurance companies that refused to pay on prewar policies; and the legal wrangle going on today in American courts over art looted by the Nazis in wartime Europe. He describes both the human and legal dramas involved in the struggle for restitution, bringing the often-forgotten voices of Holocaust survivors to the forefront. He also addresses the controversial legal and moral issues over Holocaust restitution and the ethical debates over the distribution of funds. With an eye to the future, Bazyler discusses the enduring legacy of Holocaust restitution litigation, which is already being used as a model for obtaining justice for historical wrongs on both the domestic and international stage. Click the book cover above to read more.






HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
The Incredible True Story of a German-Jewish Teenager's Struggle to Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland
by Betty Lauer
Smith & Kraus (May 1, 2004)
From Publishers Weekly: Even if you think you've read enough about the Holocaust, start this extraordinary eyewitness account, and you won't quit till you're finished. Bertel Weissberger (now Betty Lauer) was 12 in April 1938 when her father was expelled from Germany and went to America. That October, Bertel; her sister, Eva; and her mother-along with truckloads of other German Jews-were sent to Poland. Initially, they lived as registered Jews, with special curfews, work assignments and food rations. Then came armbands, herding into ghettos and the "liquidations" of ghettos by mass executions or transports to concentration camps. Bertel and her mother-the Nazis caught Eva-got forged papers and learned to pass as Polish Christians. This was a constant strain, as IDs were continually rechecked and bounty hunters were always searching for disguised Jews. Fleeing a series of near-discoveries, Bertel and her mother ended up in Warsaw, where they fought in the 1943 uprising and were deported to an internment camp, along with Bertel's Polish Christian "husband." They bribed their way out of the camp to take various work assignments, navigated the Russian occupation of Poland, walked to Auschwitz to look for Eva and stowed away on a ship from Poland to Sweden, finally sailed to America. Beyond the incredible journey, this day-by-day account of a teenager learning "survival dexterity"-how to extract assistance from the ambivalent, how to sense danger in the slightest gesture-is unforgettable. Click the book cover above to read more.






To Wear the Dust of War
From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land
(Palgrave Studies in Oral History)
by Samuel Iwry, Leslie J.H. Kelley (Editors)
2004
On the eve of World War I, ten-year-old Samuel Iwry and his family joined other Jewish refugees in fleeing Poland for Russia. At age twenty-nine, Iwry was forced to flee again--this time from the Soviets--and ended up in Shanghai, joining 20,000 Jewish refugees already there. The story of the diaspora caused by the Holocaust is well-known, but the Far Eastern dimension has come to light only very recently. Iwry's story unfolds in his own compelling words, conveying the harrowing details of flight and survival into vivid detail. Leslie Kelly suceeds in placing Iwry's experiences into much wider historical context. This oral history sheds light on Jewish life in eastern Europe during the inter-war period, the search for a safe haven from Nazis and Soviets, daily life in the Shanghai ghetto, and emigration to America. Iwry's story is representative of the Jewish experience but also completely unique. Samuel Iwry is Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Leslie J.H. Kelley is a writer and editor who studied with Professor Iwry. Click the book cover above to read more.






ONE LIFE
by TOM LAMPERT
November 2004. Harcourt
PW writes: The author, an American-born scholar living in Berlin, documents the Nazi era in Germany through eight largely unconnected stories of lesser-known figures-some perpetrators, some victims, one a vicious dog at Treblinka (or perhaps it's really about Konrad Lorenz, a former Nazi party member and later Nobelist who testifies on the dog's behalf). Despite Lampert's prodigious research, he is less than successful in meeting his intent "to alleviate some of the moralizing pressure... that make[s] it impossible to think concretely about... the Holocaust." He wants readers to see that not all perpetrators were evil, nor all victims innocent. Miriam P. is a young, criminally destructive Jewish psychopath executed by the Nazis in their roundup of mental patients. Erich B. is a ruthless SS executioner who loved his children and suffered greatly from physical ailments. The most nuanced and compelling chronicle is that of Karl L., who headed the Jewish police in Theresienstadt, obsessively pursuing stealing and corruption by prisoners; later, when accused of Nazi collaboration, he defended his actions as in the best interest of the inmates. But it's not news that some Nazis, like Wilhelm K. in the title piece, tried to save some Jews, or that some Jews may have collaborated with the Nazis. Does knowledge of this interfere with clear moral thinking about the Holocaust? Though his tales are fascinating, Lampert's purpose in telling them seems muddled.
Julia Klein, writing in the SF Chicago Tribune in November 2004, wrote, "...The form of Lampert's book, translated by the author from the original German, is based on the cool, meticulous piecing together of factual information from scattered documentary sources. Each narrative is presented in chronological order, with little embellishment, save for suggestive subtitles such as "Sieg Heil and Rich Pickings." Lampert deliberately eschews literary shaping, as well as overt judgments. The idea, he explains, is to "alleviate some of the moralizing pressure, which almost inevitably arises when dealing with such issues, to `speak out' or `take a stand'--imperatives that make it difficult if not impossible to think concretely about National Socialism or the Holocaust." To that end, Lampert says, he has sought "to avoid didacticism" of any kind. This virtual abdication of authority and perspective will no doubt frustrate some readers and leave them wanting more, especially in the case of the shorter narratives. As one might expect, the richer the documentary record, the closer its mere unveiling comes to satisfying us. So the most fascinating, as well as complete, case study is of Karl L., who arguably inhabits the gray zone of collaboration described by Primo Levi in "The Drowned and the Saved." (Another literary influence on "One Life" may be Franz Kafka: Lampert's characters are all referred to by initials and must make their way in a world that is threatening and insane.)..."
Click the book cover above to read more.







Cherished Illusions
by Sarah Stern "
April 2005, Balfour
When Rachel, a child of Holocaust survivors, finds that her life has intersected with that of Danielle, a refined woman with a mysterious past...old fears and painful discoveries bind the two women together in a blur of emotions and choices. As the two oddly matched friends open up to each other, one reveals a dark secret and her longing for redemption. The other purposes to walk with her through dark days ahead, from which they hope to emerge into the light. This first novel from Sarah Stern weaves startling facts about ancient hatreds directed toward the Jewish people with a rich, detailed narrative that readers will find engrossing. Through her supple writing and an imagination rooted in truth-seeking, Stern has crafted a novel for all ages. The author, Sarah Stern, is the director of the Washington office for the American Jewish Congress. Born in Westchester County, NY, she carries the name of an aunt who perished in the gas chambers at Aushwitz. Click the book cover above to read more.








The Ransom of the Jews
The Story of Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel
by Radu Ioanid
Afterword by Elie Wiesel
Ivan R Dee; (January 2005)
From Publishers Weekly: Ioanid (The Holocaust in Romania) sheds light on an extraordinary, little-known and shameful episode that explains some mysteries of international affairs, such as why Romania was the only Soviet bloc country to maintain relations with Israel after the Six-Day War. Drawing on interviews and on highly classified Romanian documents, Ioanid relates how Romania in the 1950s and '60s demanded payments in cash and goods from Israel in exchange for the emigration of Romanian Jews to the Jewish state. A historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ioanid places these events in the context of a cash-starved Romania, turning away from Russia and eager for Western trade, oil-drilling equipment and agricultural goods. In the late 1960s, the human trade allowed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his family to build their private bank accounts. "Jews, Germans, and oil are our best export commodities," the dictator said in the mid-1970s. He insisted the payments per Jew be determined by his or her "education, profession, employment, and family status." Ioanid carefully follows all the ups and downs in negotiations and relations between Israel and Romania, and the impact of protests from Arab countries and Western demands for human rights. Ioanid does a service in reporting on this sordid tale of exploitation and the trade in human beings. Click the book cover above to read more.






Hitler's Pope
The Secret History of Pius XII
by John Cornwell
2000. Penguin
Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, has long been the subject of controversy over his failure to speak out against Hitler's Final Solution. In Hitler's Pope, award-winning journalist and Roman Catholic John Cornwell shows that, even well before the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII was instrumental in negotiating an accord that helped the Nazis rise to unhindered power--and sealed the fate of the Jews in Europe. Drawing upon secret Vatican and Jesuit archives to which he had exclusive access, Cornwell tells the full, tragic story of how narcissism, longstanding personal antipathy for the Jews, and political and spiritual ambition combined to make Pius the most dangerous churchman in history. A firm and final indictment of Pius XII's papacy, Hitler's Pope is also a searing exploration of its lingering consequences for the Catholic church today. A BEST SELLER. The LA TIMES wrote: Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1999 In May 1940, some 14 months after the election to the papacy of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who took the name Pius Xii, the French cardinal, Eugene Tisserant, wrote privately to the cardinal archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Suhard: "I fear that history will reproach the Holy See for having practiced a policy of selfish convenience and little else." Among Catholics, Tisserant's dim view of Pius XII was that of a small minority only, at least until the pope's death in October 1958. Since the early 1960's, however, when Rolf Hochhuth's play "The Deputy" caused a worldwide scandal and triggered passionate debate, the controversy regarding Pius XII's attitude toward Nazi Germany, and particularly his silence in the face of the extermination of the Jews, has sporadically erupted among Catholics and in the Christians world. For Jews, the subject has remained of major importance, linked as it is not only to the past but also to ongoing relations between the two faiths. John Cornwell's book is illuminating in the analysis of Pacelli's formative years, in the assessment of his personality, in the discussion of German political Catholicism for the sake of the concordat with Hitler and in the description of Pacelli's unrelenting efforts to centralize all major initiatives in the pope's hands. In dealing with the war years and particularly with Pius XII's silence in the face of extermination of the Jews. It is the section of Cornwell's book dealing with the war period that will certainly rekindle the strongest controversy.
Click the book cover above to read more.






The Myth of Hitler's Pope
How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis
by Rabbi David G. Dalin
2005. Regenery
Rabbi Dalin teaches at the Catholic Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida. He refutes the books that say Pope Pius did not fight Nazism and the deportation of Jews. He thinks the smearing of Pope Pius XII is utterly bankrupt. He thinks Pope Pius XII is actually considered by some as a righteous gentile. He would rather the general public focus their gaze on Hitler's mufti instead of the pope, since the mufti met with more Nazis.
From the Inside Flap: Was Pope Pius XII secretly in league with Adolf Hitler? No, says Rabbi David G. Dalin-but there was a cleric in league with Hitler: the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. As Pope Pius XII worked to save Jews from the Nazis, the grand mufti became Hitler's staunch ally and a promoter of the Holocaust, with a legacy that feeds radical Islam today. In this shocking and thoroughly documented book, Rabbi Dalin explodes the myth of Hitler's pope and condemns the myth-makers for not only rewriting history, but for denying the testimony of Holocaust survivors, hijacking the Holocaust for unseemly political ends, and ignoring the real threat to the Jewish people. In The Myth of Hitler's Pope, you'll learn: · The true history of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust-how the Catholic Church did more than any other religious body to save Jewish lives · The real history of the Church and the Nazis-including the Nazi plan to kidnap the pope · The real agenda of the myth-makers: hijacking the Holocaust to attack the very idea of the papacy-especially the papacy of the late Pope John Paul II-as well as Christianity and traditional religion as a whole · Hitler's cleric-Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who advised and assisted the Nazis in carrying out Hitler's Final Solution · How Pope Pius XII rescued Jews-and deserves to be called a "righteous gentile"-while the grand mufti of Jerusalem called for their extermination Full of shocking and irrefutable detail, The Myth of Hitler's Pope is sure to generate controversy, and more important, to set the record straight. If you want the truth about Pope Pius XII, about the Catholic Church, the Jews, and the Holocaust, and about how the myth of Hitler's pope plays into the culture wars of our own time-and how the fact of Hitler's mufti is a vital source of radical Islam today-you must begin here.
Click the book cover above to read more.






The Nuremberg Interviews
by LEON GOLDENSOHN, ROBERT GELLATELY (Editor)
Knopf (October 2004)
In 1946 Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, conducted a series of interviews with many of the defendants and witnesses as the Nuremberg war-crimes trials unfolded. Until Gellately edited them, these interviews have been unavailable to the public. Virtually all of the top Nazi officials tried at Nuremberg are interviewed here, and their responses make for fascinating yet chilling reading. There are few surprises. Most of the defendants insist that they were unaware of the extermination camps, and many of them say they now realize the criminal nature of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. What is striking about them is what Hannah Arendt called the sheer "banality of evil." These men, with the possible exception of Julius Streicher, don't come across as fire-breathing monsters or even fanatics. In fact, under other circumstances, some of them would be viewed as rather decent. Goering, who was the charismatic "star" of court proceedings, was clearly a man of considerable intelligence and charm. Yet most of these men willingly played integral parts in a machine that practiced atrocities as a matter of routine. Without necessarily intending to do so, these men reveal how easily totalitarian systems can induce acquiescence to or even enthusiastic participation in evil.
PW writes: "How did you figure a six-month-old Jewish infant must be killed-was it an enemy?" Goldensohn asked Otto Ohlendorf at Nuremberg. "In the child," explained the SS lieutenant general, "we see the grown-up." Goldensohn, an army psychiatrist, was assigned in 1946 to the Nuremberg trials. In his evaluations of the German defendants, he quickly got over his shock at their casual acceptance of Nazi doctrine and refusal to take personal responsibility for their acts. Goldensohn died in 1961, and recently his brother Eli collected the long-stored transcripts edited by historian Gellately (The Gestapo and German Society). Goldensohn tried to coax childhood memories from the men, seeking early motivations for later monstrousness, and found little to go on. Most were ordinary people who took unexpected opportunities in politically festering interwar Germany. Few expressed even meager repentance, blaming betrayal of the Nazi ideal for the thwarting of the Garden of Eden promised by Hitler, who remained for them a political and military genius. Goldensohn's conversations with these men are perturbing because most of the them seem like many of us except for the circumstances that lured them into opportunistic deviance. Goldensohn may not have left a headline-making legacy of belated revelations, but he has complicated further the tapestry of evil. Click the book cover above to read more.




IN OUR HEARTS WE WERE GIANTS
THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE LILLIPUT TROUPE
A DWARF FAMILY'S SURVIVAL OF THE HOLOCAUST
by YEHUDA KOREN AND EILAT NEGEV (what a name!)
July 2004. Carroll and Graf
Shimshon Eizik Ovitz had ten kids, seven had the gene for dwarfism. At Auschwitz, Dr Josef Mengele loved to torment them. Therefore they lived. Through research and interviews with the youngest Ovitz daughter, Perla, the troupe's last surviving member, and other relatives, the authors weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were famous entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944. Descending into the hell of the concentration camp from the transport train, the Ovitz family-known widely as the Lilliput Troupe- was separated from other Jewish victims. When Josef Mengele was notified of their arrival, they were assigned better quarters and provided more nutritious food than other inmates. Authors Koren and Negev chronicle Mengele's experiments upon this family and the creepy fondness he developed for them. Finally liberated by Russian troops, the family eventually found their way to a new home in Israel where they became wealthy and successful performers. In Our Hearts We Were Giants is a powerful testament to the human spirit, and a triumphant tale that no reader will forget. Click the book cover above to read more.







THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
A NOVEL
by PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin Company; (October 1, 2004)
The most anticipated book of Fall 2004.
The book opens in 1940. June. Philip, his older brother and his parents are living in a small Newark apartment in a Jewish neighborhood. Philip's father is selling insurance for Met Life, but then he declines an offer for a position in management, which would require him to manage some drunk Christians and move his family to a non-Jewish area of NJ. It is a hot night, when the deadlocked Republicans offer up Lindbergh as their Presidential candidate to run against the popular FDR. Lindbergh had just given an awful speech criticizing those evil Jews, just like Ford and Reverend Coughlin. Walter Winchell, the greatest Jew after Einstein in 1940, lashes out against Lindbergh, the Jews feel relieved. But when the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invades every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for sel?shly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking of?ce as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without dif?culty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family - and for a million such families all over the country - during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. Click the book cover above to read more.
Click here for the Audio Book for those who would rather listen to it








WHERE THE BIRDS NEVER SING
The True Story of the 92nd Signal Battalion and the Liberation of Dachau
by Jack Sacco
September 30, 2004. Regan Books
In his riveting debut, Where the Birds Never Sing, Jack Sacco tells the realistic, harrowing, at times horrifying, and ultimately triumphant tale of an American GI in World War II. As seen through the eyes of his father, Joe Sacco -- a farm boy from Alabama who was flung into the chaos of Normandy and survived the terrors of the Bulge -- this is the heroic story of the young men who changed the course of history. As part of the 92nd Signal Battalion and Patton's famed Third Army, Joe and his buddies found themselves at the forefront of the Allied push through France and Germany. After more than a year of fighting, but still only twenty years old, Joe was a hardened veteran. However, nothing could have prepared him and his unit for the horrors behind the walls of Germany's infamous Dachau concentration camp. They were among the first 250 American troops into the camp, and it was there that they finally grasped the significance of the Allied mission. Surrounded by death and destruction, they not only found the courage and the will to fight, they discovered the meaning of friendship and came to understand the value and fragility of life. Told from the perspective of an ordinary soldier, Where the Birds Never Sing contains firsthand accounts and never-before-published photographs documenting one man's transformation from farm boy to soldier to liberator. Click the book cover above to read more.







AUSCHWITZ
A NEW HISTORY
by LAURENCE REES
January 2005. Public Affairs
Laurence Rees is Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC and author of five books. Published for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-a devastating and surprising account of the most infamous death camp the world has ever known. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail-from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.
Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews-their"Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a"practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Click the book cover above to read more.




Blood Libel
The Damascus Affair of 1840
By Ronald Florence
University of Wisconsin Press
In Damascus, in February 1840, a Capuchin monk and his servant disappear without a trace. Rumors point at the local Jewish community. Within weeks, the rumors turn to accusations of ritual murder-the infamous "blood libel." Torture, coerced confessions, manufactured evidence, and the fury of the crowds are enough to convict the accused Jews. By the time the rest of the world learns of the events in Damascus, the entire leadership of the Jewish community is awaiting execution. Vicious charges of ritual murder had been heard in Europe for centuries and are heard in the Middle East today-but everything else here was turned around. The accusers of the Jews were not the Muslim majority. The French consul was the chief prosecutor, aided by the British consul, with the support of the American consul. The affair became a cause célèbre in Europe and the Americas, the priorities of diplomacy intervened, and the fabric of a society that had once stretched to tolerate minorities finally burst in an outrage of fears turned to fury. The legacies of that torn fabric, and the continuing myths, feed and sustain the fervor of anti-Semitism today. Click the book cover above to read more.









THE TREE OF LIFE
A TRILOGY OF LIFE IN THE LODZ GHETTO
BOOK 1: ON THE BRINK OF THE PRECIPICE, 1939
By Chava Rosenfarb, Translated from Yiddish with Goldie Morgentaler
December 2004. Wisconsin.
The lives of 10 protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto. The author is a survivor of Lodz, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen. Click the book cover above to read more.







Oskar Schindler
The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List
by David M. Crowe
Westview Press (November 1, 2004)
Deborah Lipstadt writing in The Washington Post's Book World: "David Crowe devoted seven years, conducted scores of interviews and did research on four continents in order to write the definitive biography of Oskar Schindler. That's the good news. The bad news is that this definitive account is buried in a massive text. Crowe would have been served by a good editor, one with a relentless red pencil. Schindler, a man with many flaws, risked his life and his fortune to save more Jews during the Holocaust than anyone else did. While the young Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved a larger number of Jews, he had the assistance of an entire team of people and the financial support of American Jews. In contrast, Schindler had only the assistance of his wife, Emilie. Moreover, Schindler performed his heroic deeds only a short distance from Auschwitz... ... In contrast to the impression given by Steven Spielberg in "Schindler's List," Crowe discovered that the famous list was not compiled by Schindler but by one of his Jewish administrators, Marcel Goldberg. There is, Crowe reveals, a seamy side to this story. Aware that inclusion on the list could mean the difference between life and death, Jews bribed Goldberg to get themselves on it. In certain cases, entire families were listed, while people of lesser means were dispatched to Auschwitz and other camps... Schindler did not create the list, but, motivated by a deep sense of compassion for these people and revulsion at the Germans' actions, he did feel responsible for keeping these people alive, particularly during the harrowing final months of the war... Schindler's saga did not end with Germany's defeat. After the Holocaust, Yad Vashem initially refused to honor him as a Righteous Gentile. How, it wondered, could it balance his membership in the Nazi Party with his efforts to save Jews? Those Jews whose factory he had expropriated protested to Yad Vashem that he acquired the considerable sums he spent to save his workers through the Aryanization of Jewish property and the use of slave labor. They tried to take legal action against him. CLICK TH EBOOK COVER ABOVE TO READ MORE.






THE SETTING OF THE PEARL
VIENNA UNDER HITLER
by THOMAS WEYR
Oxford University Press; (Winter 2005)
When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city "a pearl to which he would give a proper setting." But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction--a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland. Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik; proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube--and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain--beautiful but lifeless. This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler. Click the book cover above to read more.






Kaddishel
A Life Reborn
by Aharon Golub, Bennett W. Golub
January 2005. Devorah Publishing, Pitsopany
Aharon Golub was born in Ludvipol, Poland. He survived, and was orphaned by the Holocaust. As a legal immigrant to Palestine in 1946, he actively worked towards Israel's independence. Moving to the US in 1954, Golub married and started a family. Bennett W. Golub, Aharon's son, is a co-founder of a leading investment and risk management firm based in New York. In KADDISHEL-A LIFE REBORN, Bennett Golub assists his father Aharon with documenting his personal history, to both better understand himself and to preserve these experiences for future generations. In doing so, the reader is given a first-hand look at three major historical eras-traditional Jewish life in a small Polish town, the mindless horrors of the Nazis, and the formation of the state of Israel. It is an indication of Aharon's strength that even after witnessing the death of his family members, his resolve is not rage or hatred but rather, the deep conviction that the Jewish people need their own homeland and the power to protect themselves the world over. Aharon's journey leads eventually to America where he raises his own family and has his own Kaddishel to live on and help him tell his story. Click the book cover above to read more.







History on Trial
My Day in Court with David Irving
by Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University
February 2005, Ecco
In 1993, Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish Studies at Emory University, published the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust denial movement. In this critically acclaimed account, Lipstadt called David Irving -- a prolific, respected, and well-known writer on World War II who had, over the years, made controversial statements about Hitler and the Jews -- one of the most dangerous spokespersons of the denial movement.
A year later, when Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin UK, for libel in a London courtroom, the media spotlight fell on Deborah Lipstadt and, by extension, on the historiography of the Holocaust. Five years later, when David Irving lost his case after an intense ten-week trial, Lipstadt's resounding victory was proclaimed on front pages of newspapers worldwide. The implications of the trial, however, were far from over.
History on Trial is Deborah Lipstadt's personal, riveting chronicle of the legal battle with Irving, in which she went from a relatively quiet existence as a professor at an American university to being a defendant in a sensational libel case. This blow-by-blow account reveals how Lipstadt fund-raised $1.5 million for her defense, which included a first-rate team of solicitors, historians, and experts, among them Anthony Julius, a literary scholar who is better known as the late Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. Lipstadt describes how in forced silence she endured Irving's relentless provocations, including his claims that more people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, that survivors tattooed numbers on their arms to make money, and that nonwhite people are a different "species." She also reveals how her lawyers gained access to Irving's personal papers, which exposed his association with neo-Nazi extremists in Germany, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and the National Alliance, which wants to transform America into an "Aryan society." In the course of the trial, Lipstadt's legal team stripped away Irving's mask of respectability through exposing the prejudice, extremism, and distortion of history that defined his work, even his once highly regarded account of the Dresden bombing.
Part history, part edge-of-your-seat courtroom drama, History on Trial goes beyond the historiography of World War II and the Holocaust to reveal the intricate way in which extremism and deliberate historical distortions gain widespread legitimacy and help generate hatred. An inspiring personal story of perseverance and unexpected limelight, here is the definitive account of the trial that tested the standards for historical and judicial truths, a trial that the Daily Telegraph of London proclaimed did "for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." Click on the bookcover above to read more.
By the way... HBO and Ridley Scott's production company was working on a film on the case. Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay. But when HBO asked him to add some fictional elements to the story to jazz it up, Harwood refused. How could he add fictional elements to a story that is about the truth. The film project therefore died a quiet death





HOPE AND HONOR
By MAJOR GENERAL SID SHACHNOW (ret.) with JANN ROBBINS
October 2004. St Martins
PW Writes, "Part Holocaust memoir and part U.S. Army career narrative, this tale of an extraordinary life begins with young Schaja Shachnowski, a Lithuanian Jew, watching the Nazis march into his town. Taken with his family to a concentration camp, they survived by bribery, quick wits, the help of the Jewish camp police and the occasional assistance of local Lithuanians. Schaja was impressed by American GIs and remembered them after he and his family were eventually admitted to the U.S.: wanting to marry a Christian girl whom his family loathed and also unable to find a decent job, he enlisted in the army in 1955. This began a 40-year career, covered in the book's second half, that ended with him a much decorated major general, having spent most of his career in Special Forces, eventually becoming its commanding general. He served two tours in Vietnam, commanded the Berlin Brigade and fought for an enlarged role for Special Forces. He is also still married to his boyhood love, a remarkably enduring person in her own right. Schachnow's life certainly demonstrates the title qualities, as well as high professional integrity and a ferocious will to survive. His telling of it is not always graceful, but his story comes through clearly and with conviction." Click the book cover above to read more.







SHANGHAI DIARY
A Young Girl's Journey from Hitler's Hate to War-Torn China
By URSULA BACON
October 2004.
M Press.
Soon to be a major motion picture film.. The story of a Jewish refugee in China. Click the book cover above to read more.












GI JEWS
How World War II Changed a Generation
by Deborah Dash Moore
November 2004. Belknap Harvard University Press.
Click the book cover above to read more.









They'll Have to Catch Me First
An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich
by Irene Awret
2004. Wisconsin.
Berlin 1939. A few months after Kristallnacht, eighteen-year old Irene Spicker tries to flee to Belgium but ends up in a Nazi prison. Freed after a few weeks, she tries again-this time, in the dark of night, she successfully crosses the frontier. The Germans invaded Belgium, and Irene was forced into hiding. Constantly on the move, she worked as a farmhand, at one point using false identity papers. Arrested by the Gestapo, she sat in a cellar prison cell destined for transport to Auschwitz. To calm her fears, she made a small detailed drawing of her hand which was to save her life. Incarcerated in the concentration camp in Mechlen, she was assigned to paint signs, posters and numbers for her co-prisoners to wear around their necks. This is Irene Awret's story of her first twenty-five years, from coming of age in a middle-class Jewish family to Mechlen where she met the young sculptor Azriel Awret, to liberation and freedom once more. Click the book cover above to read more.









The Lesser Evil
The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-1959
BY Victor Klemperer, Martin Chalmers
Summer 2004.
This third and final volume of the diaries of Klemperer, a German-Jewish professor of philology who survived the Nazis because his wife was Christian, lacks the inherent drama of his life under the Nazis, related in the first two, highly acclaimed volumes, and many readers will be mystified by the political twists and turns of East German communism. Nonetheless, Klemperer was an acute observer of life's complexities, and the diary becomes quite a good read. In 1945, he is amazed that he has survived, but the conditions of life are still wrenching. He is suspicious of all the former acquaintances who shunned him in the Nazi years and now fawn over him. As a privileged academic in Communist East Germany, Klemperer attends endless, mind-numbing meetings, but also receives a number of appointments, a good salary and a cherished automobile. He publishes his most important work, LTI, a study of Nazi language. As someone who had suffered so acutely under the Nazis, he believes communism is "the lesser evil," yet he is anguished by the parallels between Nazism and communism. The diary is a poignant document about life under communism and the political choices that so many Europeans faced after WWII. Click the book cover above to read more.









RESILIANCE AND COURAGE
Women, and Men, and the Holocaust
by Nechama Tec
Yale University Press; (April 1, 2003).
In this, Nechama Tec's fifth book on the Holocaust, vivid individual stories blend effortlessly with detailed comparisons of wartime experiences of women and men. The result is a captivating account of how the coping strategies and the ultimate fate of each sex differed. Tec, as always, listens to the voices of the oppressed, voices that originated in wartime diaries, postwar memoirs, archival materials, and her own interviews with survivors and rescuers. Concentrating on life under extreme conditions, Tec's research uncovers the previously overlooked significance of mutual cooperation and compassion that operated across gender lines. Click the book cover above to read more.









The BIELSKI BROTHERS
In the Woods, We Were Free: The True Story of the Bielskis, Three Brothers Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest
by PETER DUFFY
July 2003. HarperCollins. In New York City, Queens County, there lived two brothers. They were uncelebrated, unassuming, and one had a grocery supply route. What their neighbors and co-workers did not know was that these brothers, with another brother, led 1200 Jews into the forests during WWII, saved more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler, created a town, and formed platoons of armed resistance to kill Nazi soldiers. For two and a half years, they hid and fought. They made their refuge a place open to all types of Jews, young or old, healthy or infirmed, Betar, Zionist, or Socialist. The author writes a documentary portrait of the family prior to WWI, between the wars, and during the war. After witnessing the murder of their parents and 2 siblings, Asael, Tuvia, and Zus Bielski fled into the forest and spread the word that there was a haven in the woods. Over time, 1200 Jews were saved by living with them in the forest. There was a temple, a bathhouse, a store, and even a theater in the woods. For 2 and a half years they eluded the Nazis and death. This is their story. Click to read more.









Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp by Rochelle G. Saidel (University of Sao Paulo)

April 2004. University of Wisconsin
Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. Located about fifty miles north of Berlin, the camp was the site of murder by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, "medical" experimentation, and gassing. While this camp was designed to hold 5,000 women, the actual figure was six times this number. Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women from twenty-three countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, including political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials" (including Gypsies, prostitutes, and lesbians), criminals, and Jewish women (who made up about 20 percent of the population). Only 15,000 survived. Drawing upon more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbrück's Jewish women prisoners. She worked for over twenty years to track down these women whose poignant testimonies deserve to be shared with a wider audience and future generations. Their memoirs provide new perspectives and information about satellite camps (there were about 70 slave labor sub-camps). Here is the story of real daily camp life with the women's thoughts about food, friendships, fear of rape and sexual abuse, hygiene issues, punishment, work, and resistance. Saidel includes accounts of the women's treatment, their daily struggles to survive, their hopes and fears, their friendships, their survival strategies, and the aftermath. . Click to read more.






JEWS TURKS AND OTHER STRANGERS
THE ROOTS OF PREJUDICE IN MODERN GERMANY
by Jerome S. Legge, Jr.
August 2003. University of Wisconsin Press.
Scholarly, objective, insightful, and analytical, Jews, Turks, and Other Strangers studies the causes of prejudice against Jews, foreign workers, refugees, and emigrant Germans in contemporary Germany. Using survey material and quantitative analyses, Legge convincingly challenges the notion that German xenophobia is rooted in economic causes. Instead, he sees a more complex foundation for German prejudice, particularly in a reunified Germany where perceptions of the "other" sometimes vary widely between east and west, a product of a traditional racism rooted in the German past. By clarifying the foundations of xenophobia in a new German state, Legge offers a clear and disturbing picture of a conflicted country and a prejudice that not only affects Jews but also fuels a larger, anti-foreign sentiment. Click the book cover above to read more.








Beating the Odds
A Boyhood Under Nazi-Occupied France
by George M. Burnell, MD
1stBooks Library; (September 2002).
The book is about what can happen when the international community ignores a power-hungry dictator who schemes and plots the destruction of free and civilized countries. The date was September 1939. The dictator: Adolf Hitler. The nations: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, England, the U.S. It is also the story of Dr. Burnell's involvement in the Resistance, his narrow escapes from the Nazis and the French police, the bombings from the Germans, the British and the Americans. He has also researched some little known facts about WWII, such as why Paris wasn't destroyed by the Germans, what did Roosevelt really know about the Holocaust, why did the Allies procrastinate when Hitler showed his intentions to invade other countries and conquer the world. It's not heavy reading and there are many stories with humor, twists and turns, and many illustrations. Click the book cover above to read more.








GERMAN-JEWISH IDENTITIES IN AMERICA
Edited by Christof Mauch and Joseph Salmons.
November 2003. University of Wisconsin Press.
Changing political, social, and cultural circumstances have led German Jews in America to take on many different identities. These essays examine such varied topics as the relationship between German and Eastern European Jews in America, the development of the B'nai Brith, nineteenth-century Jewish community-building in Chicago, the role of German Jews in the building of modern American show business, and the correlation between date of emigration and language loss among Jews fleeing to America from Nazi Germany. Contributors include historians, theater and literature professors, a linguist, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Click the book cover above to read more.








A HREF=" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0299193306/sefersafarianonl " target="_blank"> INSIDE A CLASS ACTION
THE HOLOCAUST AND THE SWISS BANKS
by Jane Shapiro.
October 2003. University of Wisconsin Press.
On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. Hausfeld wanted to use the suit to prove that the banks not only concealed and refused to return millions of dollars in dormant accounts, but that they acted as a conduit for looted assets and slave labor profits. Such behavior, he charged, violated the code of ethics known as customary international law. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement. Through interviews with a wide range of people involved in the case and detailed research of documents and court transcripts, Jane Schapiro shows the ways that egos, personalities, and values clash in such a complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider's view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion, which will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law. Click the book cover above to read more.








REFUGE IN HELL
How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis
by Daniel B. Silver
September 2003. Houghton Mifflin.
How did Berlin's Jewish Hospital, in the middle of the Nazi capital, survive as an institution where Jewish doctors and nurses cared for Jewish patients throughout World War II? How could it happen that when Soviet troops liberated the hospital in April 1945, they found some eight hundred Jews still on the premises? Daniel Silver carefully uncovers the often surprising answers to these questions and, through the skillful use of primary source materials and the vivid voices of survivors, reveals the underlying complexities of human conscience. The story centers on the intricate machinations of the hospital's director, Herr Dr. Lustig, a German-born Jew whose life-and-death power over medical staff and patients and finely honed relationship with his own boss, the infamous Adolf Eichmann, provide vital pieces to the puzzle -- some have said the miracle -- of the hospital's survival. Silver illuminates how the tortured shifts in Nazi policy toward intermarriage and so-called racial segregation provided a further, if hugely counterintuitive, shelter from the storm for the hospital's resident Jews. Scenes of daily life in the hospital paint an often heroic and always provocative picture of triage at its most chillingly existential. Not since Schindler's List have we had such a haunting story of the costs and mysteries of individual survival in the midst of a human-created hell. Click the book cover above to read more.







A MATCH MADE IN HELL
THE JEWISH BOY AnD THE POLISH OUTLAW WHO DEFIED THE NAZIS
by LARRY STILLMAN from the testimony of Morris Goldner
Fall 2003. Univ of Wisconsin Press
When Moniek (Morris) Goldner and his family were uprooted from their Polish farming village during a German aktion, the child-sized sixteen-year-old fled into the forests. He eventually met up with his father, who had also escaped, and together they managed to survive until a former friend betrayed the pair. Wounded and left for dead beneath his father's murdered body, Goldner was rescued by the enigmatic outlaw Jan Kopec, who was also in hiding, looking for ways to profit from his criminal expertise. For eighteen months Kopec hid the boy with him, moving from one area to another, often staying in hideouts he had fashioned years earlier. At first Kopec trained Goldner simply to serve as his accomplice in robberies and black market activities. But before long he pushed the training to a whole new level, making it possible for him to sell Goldner's services to a shadowy resistance group which was becoming interested in the daring young saboteur. And through it all, these two disparate personalities-the quiet, small-framed boy and the stocky, callous mercenary-forged an remarkable friendship and co-dependency born of need and desperation in a hellish time and place. Click the book cover above to read more.





Silent Places
Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe
by Jeffrey Gusky, Judith Miller
Spring 2003. Overlook Press.
Silent Places is an indelibly moving collection of photographic images; their melancholy beauty and emotional depth provide a glimpse into the past and into eternity. Jeff Gusky, a doctor of emergency medicine decided, at the age of 42, that he wanted to better confront the reality of modern Jewish history. A self-taught photographer who subsequently learned to make museum quality prints, he "bought a good, journalist-type camera and some lenses" and traveled to Poland-once the home of the largest concentration of Diaspora Jews." He read the instruction manuals on the plane en route. Four trips later, accompanied each time by a top Polish guide, he traveled through the country, beyond the city ghettos and the sites of concentration camps, into remote villages where Jews had lived and worked for almost 1,000 years before the Holocaust-capturing on film the austere landscapes and the remains of a once thriving Jewish culture. The silence is deafening: here are Jewish cemeteries full of broken gravestones, ruined synagogues filled with trash and disfigured with graffiti, a Jewish home now used as a public toilet-"where people lived, walked, worshipped, and were, ultimately, exterminated," says Gusky. The doleful, understated clarity of what he saw and photographed capture a poignant sense of loss-making at the same time, an indelible connection to the past. . Click the book cover to read more.



Hitler's Second Book
by Gerhard L. Weinberg
October 2003. Enigma 10018.
PW writes: "In 1958, while directing the microfilming and organization of a trove of archives that the U.S. forces had taken from the Nazis at the end of WWII, historian Weinberg (A World at Arms) discovered the manuscript of a second book that Hitler had written but never published. The manuscript was published in German in 1961, accompanied by Weinberg's annotations, but this is the first authoritative English version (a pirated and poor translation appeared in the 1960s). The text bears all of Hitler's hallmarks: rambling thoughts, half-baked ideas, pedantic writing-along with a terrifying, sustained belief in war and violence as the means to ensure that Germans would flourish. Compared to Mein Kampf, there are fewer pages devoted to Jews. Nonetheless, what comes across most strongly is Hitler's abiding commitment to the principle of race and his identification of Jews as the enemy that threatened to undo all that Germans had created. Hitler dwells at length on foreign policy, and outlines a strategy of alliance with Fascist Italy and Great Britain. (He actually believed that Britain would accept a German-dominated European continent so long as Germany did not challenge the overseas British empire.) He also foresees an inevitable clash with the United States. This provides solid historical background on Hitler's thinking in the late 1920s, when his party was nothing more than a tiny, radical sect. Weinberg provides helpful notes and a very informative introduction. Click the book cover to read more.



The Last Cemetery in Berlin
A Post-Holocaust Love Story in the Ruins of the Berlin Wall
by Tania Wisbar, John Mahoney
2003.
Holocaust ghosts emerge with their unknown stories as an unexpected byproduct of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the former East Germany with the West in 1990, adding new dimensions to post-Holocaust literature. Once travel to what was East Germany, formerly a communist country, became possible again and archives sealed since World War II became available, the survivors and heirs of families whose lives and treasures were taken by the Nazis could begin their own personal searches for those lost long ago. Such a person is Lily Weitrek who travels from California in early 1991 to keep a promise to her deceased mother Theresa Weitrek. The promise made was to go and put flowers on Theresa's mother's grave in a place outside Berlin called Weissenssee. To Lily's surprise the small map she follows leads to a Jewish cemetery. Lily learns clue by clue that her mother had built a false personal history for herself and the two infant daughters she had smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1940. Her mother's second bequest is a property claim for a legendry German shoe factory owned previously by Theresa Weitrek's family that was seized and aryanized by the Nazis in 1933, its owners, Theresa's aunt, uncles and cousins, forced to flee, murdered or dead by suicide. With the help of a Berlin attorney, Wolfgang Schmidt, Lily begins the painstaking search for the history of the aryanization of the factory and for her unknown relatives, victims of Hitler's policies. The newly created German government challenges Lily with old and newly written laws regarding property claims that reach back to the Holocaust. Click the book cover to read more.



THEY'LL HAVE TO CATCH ME FIRST
An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich
By Irene Awret.
June 2003. University of Wisconsin. A founder of the Artists Colony in Tzfat Israel, and now a Virginia resident, this is her memoir of Berlin in 1939, when, as Irene Spicker, she escaped to Belgium, ended up in prison, was freed, hid, worked, was arrested by the Gestapo, and "luckily" ended up in Mechlin instead of Auschwitz. Click to read more.







THE RESCUER'S STORY
PASTOR PIERRE-CHARLES TOURIELLE IN VICHY FRANCE
By TELA ZASLOFF
June 2003. University of Wisconsin. The story of the Heugenot paster who saved Jews and other refugees in Nazi France. This is the story of him and his network of other righteous pastors and congregants. Click to read more.







A CHILDHOOD UNDER HITLER AND STALIN
MEMOIRS OF A "CERTIFIED JEW"
By Michael Wieck (Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra), translated by Penny Milbouer
June 2003. University of Wisconsin. A bestseller in Germany, tis is the account of Wieck's childhood in Konigsberg Germany, the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father. Under the nazis, he was a certified Jew, under the Russians, he was a German, and he was interned in the Rothenstein labor camp. Click to read more.









Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
by Frederic Spotts
October 2002. The opening paragraph and photo powerfully capture Spotts's argument: The Soviet army is soon to launch its final, devastating assault on Berlin; the British and the Americans are about to invade Germany from the west. And there sits Adolf Hitler, gazing longingly at a model of a rebuilt Linz, his hometown, which is slated to become a grandiose symbol of the Thousand-Year Reich. For Spotts, this proves what Hitler himself claimed: that he was at heart never a politician, but an artist. Spotts, who has written an acclaimed study of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, tries to substantiate his thesis by providing a panorama of Hitler's artistic activities, including his failed career as a painter, the purge of Jews and others from the cultural sphere, and his personal patronage of artists, musicians and architects. According to Spotts, Hitler's essence is to be found in his desire to create an empire in which "true" German art could flourish as never before. Yet Spotts overlooks the fact that Hitler, in megalomaniacal fashion, also claimed mastery of engineering, history and military strategy. His primary focus was arguably not on art, but on the creation of a racial utopia. Art and politics were but two sides of the same, racially minted coin. Spotts provides a lively, encyclopedic account of Hitler and the arts, but a more comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime can be found in Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography, which will remain the standard work for many years to come. Click to read more.






Hana's Suitcase
by Karen Levine
Spring 2003. Albert Whitman & Co.
Martha Link wrote, "Based on a Canadian Broadcasting radio documentary produced by Levine, this book tells the story of Hana Brady, a girl killed at Auschwitz, and how her suitcase came to be a part of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center. A CD recording of the radio program is available and adds to the impact and power of the book. The story ends on a positive note by ultimately uniting Japanese schoolchildren fascinated by Hana's story with her brother George Brady, the only member of their immediate family to survive the war. The book alternates between past and present, one chapter telling the story of Hana's childhood in the Czechoslovakian resort town of Nove Mesto, and the next relating the experiences of Fumiko Ishioka, a teacher dedicated to educating the children of Japan about the horrors of the Holocaust. Black-and-white photographs of Hana and her family and Ms. Ishioka and her students accompany each chapter. As Hana's narrative draws her to Auschwitz and to the end of her life, Fumiko's story brings her closer to the solution of a puzzle that began with only a suitcase and a name. The narrative moves quickly, though the writing is often oversimplified. One can assume that direct quotes come from the memories of Hana's brother, George Brady, and Fumiko Ishioka, since they were the original narrators of the radio program, but there are no notes to that effect. Unfortunately, the stilted writing and lack of source notes mar an otherwise gripping story of a family's love and a teacher's dedication. An additional purchase for Holocaust collections." Click to read more.






A Moral Reckoning:
The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
October 29, 2002. From the internationally renowned author of the best-selling Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust comes this penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust that goes beyond anything previously written on the subject. Goldhagen cuts through the historical and moral fog to lay out the full extent of the Catholic Church's involvement in the Holocaust, transforming a narrow discussion fixated on Pope Pius XII into the long-overdue investigation of the Church throughout Europe. He shows that the Church's and the Pope's complicity in the persecution of the Jews goes much deeper than has been previously understood. The Church's leaders were fully aware of the persecution. They did not speak out and urge resistance. Instead, they supported many aspects of it. Some clergy even took part in the mass murder. But Goldhagen goes further. He develops a precise way to assess the Church and its clergy's culpability, which was more e