Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past. Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad. It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain. That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks -- a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin -- travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it. A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope. "One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year"-Anthony Doerr about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II.

Mischling 1' by Sara Davidmann is an investigation into the fate of the artist?s family during the Holocaust. The book connects past and present, silence and story, memory and identity through family photographs, propaganda, artworks, texts, artefacts and documentation. These materials are interwoven to reveal personal and collective stories of great loss and survival. The publication of the book coincides with the exhibition, My name is Sara, at Four Corners Gallery, London.00Exhibition: Four Corners Gallery, London, UK (27.08-18.09.2021).

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

This book brings together the horrifying real life stories of women who woke up one day and were not who they thought they were. The government changed and they suddenly no longer had the right kind of blood, the right name, the right family background, the right physical features to be considered a member of society, city, or state. These stories are from German women who were a part of a Jewish-Christian "mixed marriage" and were subsequently persecuted under the Nuremberg laws. Hitler called them "mischling"- half-breeds, however, they have often been passed over in studies of the Holocaust--perhaps because they are often not considered "real Jews." But these women are still struggling with the nightmares of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the loss of family in concentration camps, and with their own identity-divided between their Jewish and Christian roots. Often their Jewish background was revealed to them only after Hitler's laws were passed. These are the narratives of eight women who remained in Germany, struggling to reclaim their German heritage and their cultural and religious identity. The narratives are compelling and sensitively written, addressing questions of cultural and ethnic identity.

Stoltzfus's (history, Florida State U.) 1996 book has now appeared in paper. The Rosenstrasse protest consisted almost entirely of women protesting the arrest of their Jewish husbands by the Nazis in 1943. The Nazis, surprisingly enough, gave in, and almost all of the men survived the war in their Berlin neighborhood. Using interviews with survivors and other primary resources, Stoltzfuz reconstructs the story, offering his analysis of how intermarriage with Germans was viewed by the Gestapo and by Hitler. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

She was a young German Jew. He was an ardent member of the Hitler Youth. This is the story of their parallel journey through World War II. Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck were born just a few miles from each other in the German Rhineland. But their lives took radically different courses: Helen’s to the Auschwitz concentration camp; Alfons to a high rank in the Hitler Youth. While Helen was hiding in Amsterdam, Alfons was a fanatic believer in Hitler’s “master race.” While she was crammed in a cattle car bound for the death camp Auschwitz, he was a teenage commander of frontline troops, ready to fight and die for the glory of Hitler and the Fatherland. This book tells both of their stories, side-by-side, in an overwhelming account of the nightmare that was World War II. The riveting stories of these two remarkable people must stand as a powerful lesson to us all.

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black. Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film's premier, Sid's role in Falk's fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk's incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.