Walt Dierks illuminates the everyday lives and adventures of young kids coming of age in Brooklyn during World War II. The main goal of most of them: get out of the house. The street was where the action was. It could be a stickball game featuring a pink Spaldeen and a broomstick or hooking a ride on a passing trolley car. There were other diversions, some perfectly legal, some bordering or stepping over into forbidden territory. The war years offered an environment of added responsibility alo

The young girl from the Ottawa Valley who served as a nurse in North Africa with only a helmet of fresh water a day, the teenage soldier from Fredericton who stole pig swill to survive in a Hong Kong prisoner of war camp, the English woman who survived the sinking of the Athenia to become a war-bride, and an Alberta airman who crashed off the icy coast of Greenland, these are but only four of the thirty compelling personal accounts of war experiences. Many private photographs from their own albums illustrate these stories, which reflect the world wide aspect of the war from the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic, from Poland to the Middle East, and the varied activities and duties of these young men and women. Their hardships, their adventures, frustrations, fears, joys and romances are chronicled in a poignant and often humorous manner.

Memoir of a small boy who was separated from his family at the age of three or four-years-old after his father was killed during a round-up of Jews in Latvia, and was sent to the Majdanek death camp where he was discovered by Allied soldiers in 1945.

A World War II marine officer who survived three major campaigns in the Pacific offers an authentic and compelling picture of tank warfare in this chronicle of his experiences. From the grueling combat in the rain forest of Bougainville to the fierce assault on Guam and the vicious struggle for Iwo Jima, Bertram Yaffe balances the realities of combat with personal reflections on the nature of humanity and courage under horrifying circumstances. With wry humor he takes us inside the mind of a young tank officer wrestling with the concept of war and his own need to square rationalism with an intuitive, sometimes mystical, view of reality. As a result, Yaffe shares with us the meditations and avenues of contemplation that helped him survive the grotesque experience of war and cope with the stress that so often follows extreme battlefield ordeals. Central to his ability to deal with these problems, we learn, were his deep feelings for his wife and the important family bonds their marriage helped restore - their Russian-Jewish grandfathers were brothers separated during the Russo-Japanese War.

The deeply moving, Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir of a young Jewish woman’s imprisonment at the Auschwitz death camp. In 1944, on the morning of her twenty-third birthday, Isabella Leitner and her family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp. There, she and her siblings relied on one another’s love and support to remain hopeful in the midst of the great evil surrounding them. In Fragments of Isabella, Leitner reveals a glimpse of humanity in a world of darkness. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a celebration of the strength of the human spirit as it passes through fire,” this powerful and luminous Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir, written thirty years after the author’s escape from the Nazis, has become a classic of holocaust literature and human survival. This ebook features rare images from the author’s estate.