From the Ashes of Sobibor

From the Ashes of Sobibor
Author: Thomas Toivi Blatt
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780810113022

Blatt's account of his childhood in Izbica provides a fascinating glimpse of Jewish life in Poland after the German invasion and during the period of mass deportations of Jews to the camps. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five horrifying years spent eluding both the Nazis and later anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is a firsthand account of one of the most terrifying and savage events of human history.

Escape from Sobibor

Escape from Sobibor
Author: Richard L. Rashke
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 1995
Genre: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
ISBN: 9780252064791

A story reconstructed from the diaries, notes, and memories of the six hundred Jews who revolted, three hundred of whom escaped the death camp Sobibor.

A Promise at Sobibór

A Promise at Sobibór
Author: Philip “Fiszel” Bialowitz
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299248038

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war. Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust. In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

A Narrow Bridge to Life

A Narrow Bridge to Life
Author: B Gutterman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 328
Release:
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780857450531

This is why, although the process of genocide was proceeding at top speed, some Jews were diverted from the gas chambers and sent to work at Gross-Rosen. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main provider of inmate slave laborers for the Gross-Rosen armaments, munitions, and other factories owned by giant private enterprises, such as Krupp, J.G. Farben, and Siemens. Jewish inmates were also used in the construction of Hitler's secret headquarters in the local Eulen Mountains and the secret underground tunnels used to store weapons.

Trap with a Green Fence

Trap with a Green Fence
Author: Richard Glazar
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1995-06-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0810111691

Trap with a Green Fence is Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld. Glazar gives us compelling images of these horrors in a tone that remains thoughtful but sober, affecting but simple.

What They Saved

What They Saved
Author: Nancy K. Miller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 080323001X

The discovery of a box of mementos prompts the author to explore past generations of her family, learning about her family's experience during the Holocaust as well as earlier episodes of anti-Semitism.

The Last Consolation Vanished

The Last Consolation Vanished
Author: Zalmen Gradowski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022666032X

A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.

Treblinka Survivor

Treblinka Survivor
Author: Mark S Smith
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2010-12-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0752462423

More than 800,000 people entered Treblinka, and fewer than seventy came out. Hershl Sperling was one of them. He escaped. Why then, fifty years later, did he jump to his death from a bridge in Scotland? The answer lies in a long-forgotten, published account of the Treblinka death camp, written by Hershl Sperling himself in the months after liberation and discovered in his briefcase after his suicide. It is reproduced here for the first time. In Treblinka Survivor, Mark S. Smith traces the life of a man who survived five concentration camps, and what he had to do to achieve this. Hershl's story, which takes the reader through his childhood in a small Polish town to the bridge in faraway Scotland, is testament to the lasting torment of those very few who survived the Nazis' most efficient and gruesome death factory. The author personally follows in his subject's footsteps from Klobuck, to Treblinka, to Glasgow.

Ashes in the Wind

Ashes in the Wind
Author: Jacob Presser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
ISBN: 9780285638136

Beginning in 1940, 110,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Of those, fewer than 6000 returned. 'Ashes in the Wind' is a monumental history of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and a detailed and moving description of how the Nazi party first discriminated against Jews.