Book Description
A teenage girl's peaceful farm life is upended when Stalin's Red Army captures her and her family. This memoir is a poignant account of love and loss, a beautiful tapestry woven by God's hand in the life of a WWII survivor.
Author : Mildred Schindler Janzen
Publisher : Scriptoria Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 23,93 MB
Release : 2023-01-03
Category :
ISBN :
A teenage girl's peaceful farm life is upended when Stalin's Red Army captures her and her family. This memoir is a poignant account of love and loss, a beautiful tapestry woven by God's hand in the life of a WWII survivor.
Author : Alexander Starritt
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 14,7 MB
Release : 2020-09-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0316429791
WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE A letter from a German soldier to his grandson recounts the terrors of war on the Eastern Front, and a postwar ordinary life in search of atonement, in this “raw, visceral, and propulsive” novel (New York Times Book Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator, and the difficulty of life after war. Found among his effects after his death, the letter is at once a thrilling story of adventure and a questing rumination on the moral ambiguity of war. In his years spent fighting the Russians and attempting afterward to survive the Gulag, Meissner recounts a life lived in perseverance and atonement. Wracked with shame—both for himself and for Germany—the grandfather explains his dark rationale, exults in the courage of others, and blurs the boundaries of right and wrong. We Germans complicates our most steadfast beliefs and seeks to account for the complicity of an entire country in the perpetration of heinous acts. In this breathless and page-turning story, Alexander Starritt also presents us with a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one's own life at the cost of the lives of others and asks whether we can ever truly atone.
Author : Marc H. Stevens
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 441 pages
File Size : 19,1 MB
Release : 2010-03-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1848849842
“A truly remarkable story . . . Marc Stevens has produced a fitting tribute to his father . . . who played a full part in the defeat of Nazi Germany.” —HistoryOfWar.org Peter Stevens was a German-Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager in 1933. He joined the RAF in 1939 and after eighteen months of pilot training he started flying bombing missions against his own country. He completed twenty-two missions before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Nazis in September 1941. To escape became his raison d’être and his great advantage was that he was in his native country. He was recaptured after each of his several escapes, but the Nazis never realized his true identity. He took part in the logistics and planning of several major breakouts, including The Great Escape, but was never successful in getting back to England. After liberation, when the true nature of his exploits came to light, he was awarded the Military Cross. He then served as a British spy at the beginning of the Cold War before emigrating to Canada to resume a normal life. This is the story of a heavily conflicted young man, alone in a world that is in the midst of destruction. He is afforded an opportunity to help his persecuted people to obtain a small measure of revenge. It is at once a sad yet uplifting tale of thankless and unheralded heroism. “This is a wartime career that would make any son proud, but Steven’s real triumph is in writing a biography that will satisfy the most discerning historian.” —National Defence Journal
Author : Philip D. Caine
Publisher : Potomac Books Incorporated
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 36,58 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9781574887549
An authority on pilot evasion, escape, and survival recounts extraordinary adventures that took place in Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Albania, and Greece during World War II.
Author : Leo Michel Abrami
Publisher :
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 14,2 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Evading the Nazis tells the story of a Jewish boy who lived in German-occupied France during World War II and the period that followed the liberation of Europe by the Allies. The author recounts some of the dangerous situations he faced during these years and how he eventually went into hiding on an isolated farm in Normandy where he stayed until the end of the war. In the years which followed the liberation, he entered a rabbinical seminary and he became a rabbi in the United States. The account is interspersed with vivid descriptions of how French people reacted to the presence of a foreign army in their country and how righteous individuals took upon themselves to save Jews from persecution, often at the risk of their lives.
Author : David A. Messenger
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 41,89 MB
Release : 2014-05-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0807155659
In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort. In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain, David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over. Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe.
Author : Philippe Sands
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 27,11 MB
Release : 2022-03-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0525562532
A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street. "Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le Carré, internationally renowned bestselling author Baron Otto von Wächter, a lawyer, husband, and father, was also a senior SS officer and war criminal, indicted for the murder of more than a hundred thousand Poles and Jews. Although he was given a new identity and life via “the Ratline” to Argentina, the escape route taken by thousands of other Nazis, Wächter and his plan were cut short by his mysterious, shocking death in Rome. In the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, was he being recruited by the Americans or by the Soviets—or perhaps both? Or was he poisoned by one side or the other, as his son believes—or by both? With the cooperation of Wächter’s son Horst, who believes his father to have been “a good man,” award-winning author Philippe Sands draws on a trove of family correspondence to piece together Wächter’s extraordinary life before and during the war, his years evading justice, and his sudden, puzzling death. A riveting work of history, The Ratline is part historical detective story, part love story, part family memoir, and part Cold War espionage thriller.
Author : Barbara Wojcik
Publisher : 4 Square Books
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 19,41 MB
Release : 2020-11-20
Category :
ISBN : 9781617662881
"The 14-year-old casually reached for the book Treblinka, by Jean-Francois Steiner in the History stacks at the Hinsdale, Ill., public library. She paged through, glancing at the table of contents and random pages and was horrified by what she read. Why had no one told her about the German death camps? Why did she know so little about World War II? Decades later, we open Barbara Wojcik's own book, Bud's Jacket, to the inspiring story of James "Uncle Bud" Wilschke. Shot down over coastal France in 1943, the American bombardier and his fellow airman, Robert Neil, find themselves on a desperate trek through Nazi-occupied Europe, hoping to survive and return to their UK squadron base. Including extensive research and visits to the original sites, Bud's Jacket is a tale of adventure, courage and determination. On a broader level, Wojcik pays tribute to the citizen "helpers" at all levels of French society who risked life, liberty and property to harbor Allied evaders from what good people then and now consider the forces of evil." -Dave Engel, Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., City Historian, Publisher River City Memoirs: Home Front Author Just Like Bob Zimmerman's Blues: Dylan In Minnesota
Author : Detlev Peukert
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 40,87 MB
Release : 1987-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0300038631
Describes the experiences of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany, explains how they aided or avoided Nazi programs, and analyzes the use of terror against social outsiders
Author : Donald M McKale
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 37,65 MB
Release : 2023-06-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1442213183
The stories of thirty war criminals who escaped accountability, from a historian praised for his “well written, scrupulously researched” work (The New York Times). This deeply researched book traces the biographies of thirty “typical” perpetrators of the Holocaust—some well-known, some obscure—who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the perpetrators were rarely, if ever, tried or punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany’s extermination of nearly six million European Jews. He highlights the bitter contrasts between the comfortable postwar lives of many war criminals and the enduring suffering of their victims, and how, in the face of exhaustive evidence showing their culpability, nearly all claimed ignorance of what was going on—and insisted they had done nothing wrong. “McKale ends the book with a haunting question: whether life would be different today if the Allies had pursued Holocaust criminals more aggressively after WWII. History buffs and students of the Holocaust will be fascinated.” ―Publishers Weekly “Gripping and important reading.” —Eric A. Johnson, author of What We Knew