A Lublin Survivor
Title | A Lublin Survivor PDF eBook |
Author | Esther Minars |
Publisher | Liverpool University Press |
Pages | 561 |
Release | 2018-10-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1782845712 |
Daughter of Holocaust survivors, wife, mother, grandmother and genealogist Esther was given the opportunity to document her mothers wartime survival. In transcribing verbal testimony to book form, she has engaged deeply with historical records and studied how such awful events played out over the years of Nazi rule. The memories recorded are of a vibrant pre-war Jewish Lublin life extinguished forever and for her mother Eva, survival against all odds.
A Lublin Survivor
Title | A Lublin Survivor PDF eBook |
Author | Esther Minars |
Publisher | Liverpool University Press |
Pages | 447 |
Release | 2018-10-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1782845739 |
Daughter of Holocaust survivors, wife, mother, grandmother and genealogist Esther was given the opportunity to document her mothers wartime survival. In transcribing verbal testimony to book form, she has engaged deeply with historical records and studied how such awful events played out over the years of Nazi rule. The memories recorded are of a vibrant pre-war Jewish Lublin life extinguished forever and for her mother Eva, survival against all odds.
485 Days at Majdanek
Title | 485 Days at Majdanek PDF eBook |
Author | Jerzy Kwiatkowski |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2021 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780817924188 |
In this memoir, Jerzy Kwiatkowski tells the harrowing tale of the sixteen months he spent at Majdanek, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin in occupied Poland. In stark detail, he describes the organization and operations of the camp and, for its prisoners, the fierce struggle for survival. Written in 1945, with events still fresh in his mind, Kwiatkowski's memoir provides a documentary-caliber look at prisoner life, from its mundane frustrations -- endless roll calls, rations of rutabaga and potatoes -- to its glimmers of hope -- smuggled contraband, the strong bonds formed by the prisoners. It offers a first-person view on the Nazi regime's darkest excesses, from forced labor and starvation to systematic murder. First released under Soviet-era censorship in Poland in 1966, Kwiatkowski's memoir was published in a complete, uncensored Polish version in 2018 and has now been translated into English for the first time. The edition is richly illustrated with rare archival images from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives and the State Museum at Majdanek, who are proud to make this valuable historical record available to a wide audience.
From the Ashes of Sobibor
Title | From the Ashes of Sobibor PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Toivi Blatt |
Publisher | Northwestern University Press |
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.
Himmler's Jewish Tailor
Title | Himmler's Jewish Tailor PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Lewis |
Publisher | Syracuse University Press |
Pages | 344 |
Release | 2000-02-01 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780815606062 |
Jacob Frank survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and the little-known Lipowa Labor Camp in Poland. His extraordinary skills as a tailor led him to head Heinrich Himmler's two-hundred-fifty-tailor operation, and put him into contact with such notorious SS officers as Eichmann, Gaeth, and Globocnik. An eyewitness to major Nazi operations and atrocities, Frank's intimate knowledge of beatings, torture, and murder brought him to Hamburg in 1974 to testify in the war crimes trial of Wolfgang Mohwinkel and other SS officers. Frank's account of his imprisonment at Lipowa details how factories operated within the labor camp system, the construction of Majdanek, and how he learned of mass shootings in nearby villages. The only survivor of his sixty-four-member family, Frank provides the only firsthand account in English of Lublin and the destruction of its Jewish quarter. Amid the horrors and everyday minutia of life under the Nazis, he reflects on the role of faith, the will to live, and the temptation of suicide. Frank also examines survivor guilt, Jewish identity, the psychology of victims and perpetrators, and the role of memory.
Sztetl
Title | Sztetl PDF eBook |
Author | Rose Fromm Kirsten M. D. Ph. D. |
Publisher | |
Pages | 168 |
Release | 2007-03 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780595428779 |
This is the story of Chęciny, my hometown in southern Poland, and of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the 20th Century. The Nazi invasion of Poland in October 1939 started World War II. Millions of Polish Jews died in the ensuing Holocaust, including 4,000 citizens of Chęciny, and 50 members of my family. I was lucky: my mother, brother, three sisters and I had joined my father in America in 1930. I finished high school in Chicago, went to college and graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School. I became a doctor and a psychiatrist, setting up a long and rewarding private practice in Los Angeles that spanned more than 50 years. Like the wall paintings in Pompeii, which offer a glimpse into the daily life of that city before the volcano, I hope that these stories offer a glimpse into the daily life of my hometown before the Holocaust. But most of all, this is the story of my family, and a tribute to my beloved Aunt Chana and her daughter, my cousin Rachel, whose courage and self-sacrifice saved Miriam-Chęciny's youngest survivor of the Holocaust-from the Nazi murderers.
Mielec, Poland
Title | Mielec, Poland PDF eBook |
Author | Rochelle G. Saidel |
Publisher | Gefen Publishing House Ltd |
Pages | 246 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9652295299 |
The book''s 45 visuals include rare documentation of correspondence during the Holocaust. Author Dr Rochelle G Saidel''s research was carried out as a Research Fellow at the Yad Vashem International Research Institute, as well as under the auspices of Remember the Women Institute. Mielec, Poland, is just one of many small dots on the map of the Holocaust, but its remarkable and unique history calls for closer scrutiny. Using an experimental process that was not repeated, the Nazis destroyed the Mielec Jewish community on March 9, 1942. After murdering those deemed too old or disabled to be useful, the German occupiers selected able-bodied survivors (mostly men) for slave labour and then deported the rest (4,000 mostly women, some with children) to another sector of the Generalgouvernement, the Lublin district. This process was recorded not only by the Nazis, but also by some members of the local Jewish and non-Jewish population. The visual and written documentation in this book allows us to learn about the Jewish community that had flourished in Mielec until the Holocaust, as well as the unusual way in which it was wiped out by the Nazis. In addition, testimonies and war criminal trial records describe an almost unknown brutal slave labour camp that operated on the outskirts of Mielec from before March 1942 until July 1944. Mielec is located in the Rzeszów province in southern Poland, quite close to Tarnów (and was in the Kraków district of the Generalgouvernement). Both the Jewish community and the concentration camp of Mielec have almost vanished from history, and evidence at the site is sparse. Nevertheless, what happened there can be recounted using old and new testimonies, rare photographs and documents, survivor interviews, and archival material. With the exception of a small number of people fortunate enough to survive by running and hiding, the entire population was murdered, sent to slave labor camps, or later deported to death camps from the Lublin district. Mielec was the first town in the Generalgouvernement from which the entire Jewish population was deported in the context of the Final Solution. The Nazis'' well-documented decision to deport the Jews of Mielec was made very early, in January 1942. Furthermore, after deportation to the Lublin district following an Aktion on March 9, 1942, the Mielec Jews were not murdered immediately. They were allowed to live for months under terrible circumstances in some of the small towns in that district, near Sobibór and Bełżec. Ultimately these two death camps would be the final destination for Mielec''s Jews. Another unusual aspect of the Mielec story is the labor camp that was located there. The site of the Polish National Aircraft Company (PZL), part of a Centralny Okreg Przemysłowy (Central Industrial District), was taken over by the Nazis for the manufacture of Heinkel airplanes. Later this work camp became a concentration camp, complete with tattoos and sadistic commandants. Despite these facts, histories of the Holocaust rarely mention Mielec. Today, this site is a Euro-Park industrial complex. The rare visuals about Mielec during the Holocaust are from survivor Moshe Borger (who was given a photograph album and correspondence by a Polish neighbour after World War II), from archives (the deportation), from research trips to Mielec, and from other survivors. Very early and much more recent survivor testimonies, as well as Nazi documentation, help to tell the story. The author interviewed survivors and also found Nazi war criminal trial records. Material from the unpublished manuscript of a Mielec concentration camp survivor and from the diary and unpublished manuscript of a Mielec shtetl survivor are included, as is testimony from a Mielec resident who was one of ten women to survive the Sobibór revolt. Research was carried out in Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Historical Research Institute in Warsaw, and on site in Mielec.