Our People

Our People
Author: Ruta Vanagaite
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1538133040

A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets. This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.

Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust

Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust
Author: Loic Dauvillier
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2014-04
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1596438738

A deeply moving story about a little girl hiding from the Nazis in World War II France.

The Hidden Holocaust?

The Hidden Holocaust?
Author: Günter Grau
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134260989

The persecution of lesbians and gay men by the Nazis is a subject that has been constantly debated during the last decade, providing a theme for books, articles, and plays. Until recently the discussion has remained speculative: most of the relevant documents were stored in closed East German archives, and access was denied to scholars and researchers. As a result of the unification of East and West Germany, these archives are now open. Hidden Holocaust, by the German scholars Gunter Grau and Claudia Shoppmann of Humboldt Uinversity, Berlin, demonstrates that the eradication of homosexuals was a declared gol of the Nazis even before they took power in 1933, and provide proof of the systematic anti-gay campaigns, the methods used tjo justify discrimination, and the incarceration mutilation and murder of gay men and women in Nazi concentration camps. A chilling but groud-breaking work in gay and lesbian studies.

King Leopold's Ghost

King Leopold's Ghost
Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1760785202

With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Hidden Children of the Holocaust

Hidden Children of the Holocaust
Author: Suzanne Vromen
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2010-03-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199739056

In the summer of 1942 in Belgium, Jewish parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, they quite often found sanctuary in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages. Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation.

The Hidden Girl

The Hidden Girl
Author: Lola Rein Kaufman
Publisher: Perfection Learning
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2010-03-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781606866108

After deciding to donate the dress her mother had made for her to a museum, Lola Rein Kaufman, survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, decides that it's finally time to speak publicly about her experiences.

Hidden Gold

Hidden Gold
Author: Ella Burakowski
Publisher: Second Story Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1927583756

The Gold family lived an idyllic life in pre-war Poland, each doing their part to run the family grocery store and tobacco concession. The oldest daughter, Shoshana, had many friends, her sister Esther was meticulous as she worked at the family store, and young David was doted on by them all. But that life is shattered in 1939 when Germany invades Poland and Jewish people are forced into the streets; their homes, schools, and businesses burned. We follow the Gold family's journey as they are forced into hiding. Just hours before the Nazis come to take over their current town, their mother has a premonition that today they will have a savior. When that someone appears, they are given hope for the first time since leaving home. But Shoshana has learned to be wary of strangers and knows that her family is in danger. The Golds hide in a cramped, secret enclosure for twenty-six months. Appalling conditions, starvation, fear of imminent betrayal and capture makes this a heart-stopping testament to the human spirit.

Your Name Is Renée

Your Name Is Renée
Author: Stacy Cretzmeyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2002-02-14
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0190288639

In Nazi-occupied France in 1941, four-year-old Ruth Kapp learns that it is dangerous to use her own name. "Remember," her older cousin Jeannette warns her, "your name is Renee and you are French!" A deeply personal book, this true story recounts the chilling experiences of a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust. The Kapp family flees one home after another, helped by simple, ordinary people from the French countryside who risk their lives to protect them. Eventually the family is forced to separate, and young Ruth survives the war in an orphanage where she is not allowed to see or even mention her parents. Without the trappings of lofty language or the faceless perspective of history, this first-person account poignantly recreates the terror of war seen through the eyes of an innocent child. Your Name Is Renee is a tale of suffering and redemption, fear and hope, which is bound to stir even the most hardened heart.

My Mother's Secret

My Mother's Secret
Author: J.L. Witterick
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698151526

Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who save them all. Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people...until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic—each party completely unknown to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives—all under one roof—My Mother’s Secret is a testament to the kindness, courage, and generosity of ordinary people who chose to be extraordinary.

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
Author: Miron Dolot
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 039307854X

Seven million people in the "breadbasket of Europe" were deliberately starved to death at Stalin's command. This story has been suppressed for half a century. Now, a survivor speaks. In 1929, in an effort to destroy the well-to-do peasant farmers, Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of all Ukrainian farms. In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscations, terrorizing, and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages. What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. In the resulting famine as many as seven million Ukrainians starved to death. This poignant eyewitness account of the Ukrainian famine by one of the survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with despair and death—his helplessness as friends and family were arrested and abused—and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people. But it is also the story of personal dignity in the face of horror and humiliation. And it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders.