The Choice


Book Description

A New York Times Bestseller “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story…The Choice is a reminder of what courage looks like in the worst of times and that we all have the ability to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to pay attention to what we still have.”—Oprah “Dr. Eger’s life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others. She has found true freedom and forgiveness and shows us how we can as well.” —Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate “Dr. Edith Eva Eger is my kind of hero. She survived unspeakable horrors and brutality; but rather than let her painful past destroy her, she chose to transform it into a powerful gift—one she uses to help others heal.” —Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Christopher Award At the age of sixteen, Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Hours after her parents were killed, Nazi officer Dr. Josef Mengele, forced Edie to dance for his amusement and her survival. Edie was pulled from a pile of corpses when the American troops liberated the camps in 1945. Edie spent decades struggling with flashbacks and survivor’s guilt, determined to stay silent and hide from the past. Thirty-five years after the war ended, she returned to Auschwitz and was finally able to fully heal and forgive the one person she’d been unable to forgive—herself. Edie weaves her remarkable personal journey with the moving stories of those she has helped heal. She explores how we can be imprisoned in our own minds and shows us how to find the key to freedom. The Choice is a life-changing book that will provide hope and comfort to generations of readers.




Why We Fight


Book Description

Why We Fight is a collection of essays written in the midst of the largest resurgence of the far-right in fifty years, and the explosion of antifascist, antiracist, and revolutionary organizing that has risen to fight it. The essays unpack the moment we live in, confronting the apocalyptic feelings brought on by nationalism, climate collapse, and the crisis of capitalism, but also delivering the clear message that a new world is possible through the struggles communities are leveraging today. Burley reminds us what we're fighting for not simply what we're fighting against.




Auschwitz A Mother's Story


Book Description

Suddenly there is a blow to my face, I am hurled to one side. 'My child, I have to go with her!' I scream. But Dr Mengel is standing before me, whip raised. 'Maul halten, shut up!' His eyes gleam. Filled with fear I cower down. In 1943, as the Nazi power swept across central Europe, Rosa, her husband Emanuel and their daughter, Judy, were forced into hiding. But after a year and a half of living a terrifying, day-by-day existence, they were betrayed. As they arrived in Auschwitz, Rosa was torn from her husband and her only daughter. Could she dare to hope she would see either of them again? Somehow, Rosa fought the horror and humiliation of the camp, on occasion coming dangerously close to death. In nursing the people trapped beside her, she helped others survive, but tragically she also watched them die - including a mother she had met before, with a similar story and a daughter the very same age. Her name was Edith Frank. Written immediately in the months after the war, Auschwitz - A Mother's Story tells Rosa de Winter-Levy's unique and heart-breaking personal story - from the atrocities of the camp to her journey out of hell. Powerful and affecting, it is the testimony of a mother, and the pain she will endure for the chance to hold her child again. It's night. The door opens and along with 500 other women I am taken to the so-called Krätzeblock, the scabies block. Mice and rats run over us, the women scream and cry, it's almost unbearable. There's no chance of sleep, we're all consumed by the same thought: tomorrow our final hour will have come.




Tumble Hitch


Book Description

Jessie Aitkin, the long-time Editor-in-Chief of a leading life sciences journal, receives a fantastic job offer. A young animal rights activist requests an interview with her husband, Peter Dahl, a research scientist at a prestigious institute. An unexpected revelation sets in motion a series of events that shifts the course of their careers and their relationship. In this novel, another page turner by the author of Raw Data: A Novel on Life in Science (Springer 2016), enthusiasm for basic research and for how science is – and could be – communicated combine in a thoughtful reflection on the impact of ambition on personal relationships. In a non-technical appendix, the author discusses the use of narrative in scientific papers and considers alternative modes of science publishing, one of which is featured in the novel. Storytelling in science has the potential to enhance communication, but may also have unintended consequences. This novel and the appendix explore these timely and important issues for the scientific community.




We Won't See Auschwitz (SelfMadeHero)


Book Description

When his grandmother dies, Jeremie and his elder brother want to learn more about their family's Polish roots. But Jeremie is less interested in finding out about how the Holocaust affected his family, and more interested to understand what it means to be Jewish and Polish today. They decide not to do the Holocaust trail...they won't go to Auschwitz, but instead they go to a village Zelechow (where their grandfather was born), Warsaw (where their grandmother was raised) and Krakow, which hosts Europe's largest festival of Jewish culture. During the course of a week, they discover a country that is still affected by its past. The brothers talk to lots of people including progressive rabbis and young Jewish Orthodox artists. Using their grandmother's stories, they piece together pieces of their family history. This is a semi-autographical work: from a search for identity, emerges a profound optimism and a lust for life.




I Won't Die Hungry


Book Description

I Won't Be Hungry When I Die" is the story of a woman whose hunger for a meaningful life was second only to her will to survive. In her simple, unpretentious, yet always intelligent voice, Alice Singer-Genis recounts her life, allowing the reader to accompany her from a safe childhood in the Singer House in 1930s Vilno through the horrors of the Holocaust, the post-war years in Munich and New York City, followed by ups and downs in small town America. Beyond being another shard in the mosaic of literary Holocaust documentation, this memoir is a testimony to the importance of family, love, and loyalty, to the virtues of education, generosity, and tolerance, and to the strength of the human spirit.




Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories


Book Description

The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny In 1943, the twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was innocent. All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide. Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski’s major writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring relevance.




The Story of World War II


Book Description

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published. Here are the horror and heroism of World War II in the words of the men who fought it, the journalists who covered it, and the civilians who were caught in its fury. Miller gives us an up-close, deeply personal view of a war that was more savagely fought—and whose outcome was in greater doubt—than readers might imagine. This is the war that Americans at the home front would have read about had they had access to the previously censored testimony of the soldiers on which Miller builds his gripping narrative. Miller covers the entire war—on land, at sea, and in the air—and provides new coverage of the brutal island fighting in the Pacific, the bomber war over Europe, the liberation of the death camps, and the contributions of African Americans and other minorities. He concludes with a suspenseful, never-before-told story of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, based on interviews with the men who flew the mission that ended the war.




You’ve Got to Tell Them


Book Description

On a quiet winter night in 1944, as part of their support of the Third Reich’s pogrom of European Jews, French authorities arrested Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbor’s home in Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her arrest and the subsequent year and a half in Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust, the first was that “barbarity enters on tiptoes . . . [even] in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by history.” Translated by Charles B. Potter, You’ve Got to Tell Them is the result of a friendship that formed in 1988, when Grinspan returned to visit Auschwitz for the first time since 1945 and where she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, a distinguished writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Sometimes speaking alone, sometimes speaking in close alternation, Grinspan and Poirot-Delpeche simultaneously narrate the story of her survival and the decades that followed, including how she began lecturing in schools and guiding groups that visited the death camps. Replete with pedagogical resources including a discussion of how and why the Holocaust should be taught, a timeline, and suggestions for further reading, Potter’s expert translation of You’ve Got to Tell Them showcases a clear and moving narrative of a young French girl overcoming one of the darkest periods in her life and in European history.




Auschwitz and After


Book Description

Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction and new bibliography by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. “Delbo’s exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo’s meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the ‘afterdeath’ of the Holocaust. Delbo’s powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf.”—Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award