Driving to Treblinka

Driving to Treblinka PDF Author: Diana Wichtel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781772032994
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"As a child growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s and early '60s, Diana Wichtel knew there was something different about her family. Her parents were far from forthcoming about the harrowing details of her Jewish father's journey from Poland to Canada during the Second World War, often leaving young Diana with more questions than answers. /// What she was told was that during the War, Benjamin Wichtel and several members of his family were herded onto a train headed for the Treblinka extermination camp. Along the way, Benjamin seized the opportunity to jump off the train, leaving behind his mother and five of his brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and children. Against all odds, Benjamin managed to evade the Nazis for the remainder of the War, eventually making his way to Canada and new life in Vancouver with a wife and three children of his own. But the past haunted him, and the pain of what he had gone through increasingly began to infiltrate his home life. When Diana was thirteen, her mother took the three children back to her native New Zealand, with the plan that Benjamin would at some point follow them. However, the family never saw him again. /// After decades of unanswered questions, Diana (now a journalist), set out on a journey of her own to uncover what happened to her father after they left him behind in Canada. The search became an obsession as she painstakingly uncovered information about his large Warsaw family and their fate at the hands of the Nazis, scoured archives across the world for clues to her father's disappearance, and visited the places he lived. This unforgettable memoir is a deep reflection on the meaning of family, the trauma of loss, and the insistence of memory. It asks the question: Is it better to know, or more bearable not to?"--

Driving to Treblinka

Driving to Treblinka PDF Author: Diana Wichtel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781772032994
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"As a child growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s and early '60s, Diana Wichtel knew there was something different about her family. Her parents were far from forthcoming about the harrowing details of her Jewish father's journey from Poland to Canada during the Second World War, often leaving young Diana with more questions than answers. /// What she was told was that during the War, Benjamin Wichtel and several members of his family were herded onto a train headed for the Treblinka extermination camp. Along the way, Benjamin seized the opportunity to jump off the train, leaving behind his mother and five of his brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and children. Against all odds, Benjamin managed to evade the Nazis for the remainder of the War, eventually making his way to Canada and new life in Vancouver with a wife and three children of his own. But the past haunted him, and the pain of what he had gone through increasingly began to infiltrate his home life. When Diana was thirteen, her mother took the three children back to her native New Zealand, with the plan that Benjamin would at some point follow them. However, the family never saw him again. /// After decades of unanswered questions, Diana (now a journalist), set out on a journey of her own to uncover what happened to her father after they left him behind in Canada. The search became an obsession as she painstakingly uncovered information about his large Warsaw family and their fate at the hands of the Nazis, scoured archives across the world for clues to her father's disappearance, and visited the places he lived. This unforgettable memoir is a deep reflection on the meaning of family, the trauma of loss, and the insistence of memory. It asks the question: Is it better to know, or more bearable not to?"--

Treblinka

Treblinka PDF Author: Chil Rajchman
Publisher: MacLehose Press
ISBN: 1623653126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handful of men who managed to escape. In 1945, he set down this account, a plain, unembellished and exact record of the raw horror he endured every day. This unique testimony, which has remained in the sole possession of his family ever since, has never before been published in English. For its description of unspeakably cruelty, Treblinka is a memoir that will not be superseded. In addition to Rajchman's account, this volume will include the complete text of Vasily Grossman's "The Hell of Treblinka," one of the first descriptions of a Nazi extermination camp; a powerful and harrowing piece of journalism written only weeks after the camp was dissolved.

Holocaust Journey

Holocaust Journey PDF Author: Martin Gilbert
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795346778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
“A travelogue, spanning two weeks, of the essential sites of the Holocaust, by the venerable historian and author . . . [A] soul-searching trip” (Kirkus Reviews). In 1996, prominent Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert embarked on a fourteen-day journey into the past with a group of his graduate students from University College, London. Their destination? Places where the terrible events of the Holocaust had left their mark in Europe. From the railway lines near Auschwitz to the site of Oskar Schindler’s heroic efforts in Cracow, Poland, Holocaust Journey features intimate personal meditations from one of our greatest modern historians, and is supported by wartime documents, letters, and diaries—as well as over fifty photographs and maps by the author—all of which help interweave Gilbert’s trip with his students with the surrounding history of the towns, camps, and other locations visited. The result is a narrative of the Holocaust that ties the past to the present with poignancy and power. “Gilbert . . . is a dedicated guide to this difficult material. We can be grateful for his thoroughness, courage and guidance.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

KL

KL PDF Author: Nikolaus Wachsmann
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429943726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
The “deeply researched, groundbreaking” first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps (Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker). In a landmark work of history, Nikolaus Wachsmann offers an unprecedented, integrated account of the Nazi concentration camps from their inception in 1933 through their demise, seventy years ago, in the spring of 1945. The Third Reich has been studied in more depth than virtually any other period in history, and yet until now there has been no history of the camp system that tells the full story of its broad development and the everyday experiences of its inhabitants, both perpetrators and victims, and all those living in what Primo Levi called “the gray zone.” In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system. Closely examining life and death inside the camps, and adopting a wider lens to show how the camp system was shaped by changing political, legal, social, economic, and military forces, Wachsmann produces a unified picture of the Nazi regime and its camps that we have never seen before. A boldly ambitious work of deep importance, KL is destined to be a classic in the history of the twentieth century. Praise for KL A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best History Book of 2015 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category “[A] monumental study . . . a work of prodigious scholarship . . . with agonizing human texture and extraordinary detail . . . Wachsmann makes the unimaginable palpable. That is his great achievement.” —Roger Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “Wachsmann’s meticulously detailed history is essential for many reasons, not the least of which is his careful documentation of Nazi Germany’s descent from greater to even greater madness. To the persistent question, “How did it happen?,” Wachsmann supplies voluminous answers.” —Earl Pike, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Treblinka Survivor

Treblinka Survivor PDF Author: Mark S Smith
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752462423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
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.

Vera Gran: The Accused

Vera Gran: The Accused PDF Author: Agata Tuszynska
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307269124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The extraordinary, controversial story of Vera Gran, beautiful, exotic prewar Polish singing star; legendary, sensual contralto, Dietrich-like in tone, favorite of the 1930s Warsaw nightclubs, celebrated before, and during, her year in the Warsaw Ghetto (spring 1941–summer 1942) . . . and her piano accompanist: W³adys³aw Szpilman, made famous by Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film The Pianist, based on Szpilman’s memoir. Following the war, singer and accompanist, each of whom had lived the same harrowing story, were met with opposing fates: Szpilman was celebrated for his uncanny ability to survive against impossible odds, escaping from a Nazi transport loading site, smuggling in weapons to the Warsaw Ghetto for the Jewish resistance. Gran was accused of collaborating with the Nazis; denounced as a traitor, a “Gestapo whore,” reviled, imprisoned, ultimately exonerated yet afterward still shunned as a performer . . . in effect, sentenced to death without dying . . . until she was found by Agata Tuszyñska, acclaimed poet and biographer of, among others, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel laureate (“Her book has few equals”—The Times Literary Supplement). Tuszyñska, who won the trust of the once-glamorous former singer, then living in a basement in Paris—elderly, bitter, shut away from the world—encouraged Gran to tell her story, including her seemingly inexplicable decision to return to Warsaw to be reunited with her family after she had fled Hitler’s invading army, knowing she would have to live within the ghetto walls and, to survive, continue to perform at the popular Café Sztuka. At the heart of the book, Gran’s complex, fraught relationship with her accompanist, performing together month after month, for the many who came from within the ghetto and outside its walls to hear her sing. Using Vera Gran’s reflections and memories, as well as archives, letters, statements, and interviews with Warsaw Ghetto historians and survivors, Agata Tuszyñska has written an explosive, resonant portrait of lives lived inside a nightmare time, exploring the larger, more profound question of the nature of collaboration, of the price of survival, and of the long, treacherous shadow cast in its aftermath.

My Promised Land

My Promised Land PDF Author: Ari Shavit
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812984641
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

The Operation Reinhard Death Camps

The Operation Reinhard Death Camps PDF Author: Yitzhak Arad
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253034477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews. Few victims survived to tell their stories, and the camps were largely forgotten after they were dismantled in 1943. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps bears eloquent witness to this horrific tragedy. This newly revised and expanded edition includes new material on the history of the Jews under German occupation in Poland; the execution and timing of Operation Reinhard; information about the ghettos in Lublin, Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Galicia; and updated numbers of the victims who were murdered during deportations. In addition to documenting the horror of the camps, Yitzhak Arad recounts the stories of those courageous enough to struggle against the Nazis and their "final solution." Arad's work retrieves the experiences of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and exposes a terrible chapter in humanity's history.

The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse

The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse PDF Author: Philip Schultz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242900
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
“Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history.” —Elie Wiesel I, one Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski, Head Clerk of Closed Files, a department of one, work… in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.

The Wish Child

The Wish Child PDF Author: Catherine Chidgey
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640092676
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This internationally bestselling historical novel that "fans of The Book Thief will enjoy" follows two children and a mysterious narrator as they navigate the falsehoods and wreckage of WWII Germany (Publishers Weekly). Germany, 1939. As Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, two children, Sieglinde and Erich, find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city, people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives. Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the ruins of a nation’s dream. Winner of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Awards “A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist.” —The Times (London)