Hitler’s Jewish Refugees


Book Description

An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.




Into the Forest


Book Description

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.




The Unwanted


Book Description

"The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape the Nazis, and an illuminating account of America's struggle with the refugee crisis caused by the rise of Hitler. Official tie-in to the U.S. Holocaust Museum multi-year exhibit"--




Generation Exodus


Book Description

This text is a generational history of the young people whose lives were irrevocably shaped by the rise of the Nazis. Half a million Jews lived in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. Over the next decade, thousands would flee. Among these refugees, teens and young adults formed a remarkable generation. They were old enough to appreciate the loss of their homeland and the experience of flight, but often young and flexible enough to survive and even flourish in new environments. This generation has produced such disparate figures as Henry Kissinger and "Dr Ruth" Westheimer. Walter Laqueur has drawn on interviews, published and unpublished memoirs and his own experiences as a member of this group of refugees, to paint a vivid and moving portrait of Generation Exodus.




Well Worth Saving


Book Description

"A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe. The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era."--Provided by publisher.




Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust


Book Description

This pamphlet is intended to assist educators who are preparing to teach Holocaust studies and related subjects.




Escapees


Book Description

Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.




FDR and the Jews


Book Description

Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler's Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America's gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz's gas chambers. In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician-compassionate but also pragmatic-struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to others' fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from his advisers and the American public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists abroad. Though his actions may seem inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure. His moral position was tempered by the political realities of depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American politicians in the twenty-first century.




Escaping Hitler


Book Description

Escaping Hitler is the personal story of Eva Wyman and her family’s escape from Nazi Germany to Chile in the sociohistorical context of 1930s and 1940s, a time when the Chilean Nazi party had an active presence in the country’s major institutions. Based primarily oninterviewswith German Jewish refugees and family correspondence, Eva Goldschmidt Wyman provides an intimateaccount of Jews in Germany in the 1930s as Nazi controls tightened and family members were taken to Riga concentration camp. Wyman recounts Kristallnacht in Stuttgart, where her father was principal of the Jewish school, his imprisonment in Dachau, and his release and immigration to Great Britain. Escaping Hitler details the family’s escape from Germany and subsequent life in Chile, providing an intimate look at daily life on the steam ship Conte Grande during the voyage from Italy to Chile in 1939, Nazi espionage and anti-Semitic activity in Chile, and the Nazi influence in South America in general. Recounted in an intimate and personal style, Escaping Hitler immerses the reader in an extraordinary chapter of contemporary Jewish history both inside Germany and South America.




Escaping Hitler


Book Description

Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gnter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened his family, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gnter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned. The author gathered her information through interviews with Gnter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional foot-stepping journey in September 2013 the author visited Gnters birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gnters walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.