This shattering memoir by a journalist about his father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden won the prestigious August Prize On August 2, 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town to begin his life anew. Having endured the ghetto of Lodz, the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany, his final challenge is to survive the survival. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood to tell the story of his father: walking at his side, holding his hand, trying to get close to him. It is also the story of the chasm between the world of the child, permeated by the optimism, progress, and collective oblivion of postwar Sweden, and the world of the father, darkened by the long shadows of the past.

Going beyond the fanatical anti-Semitism of Hitler and his chiefs, Schleunes analyzes "the internal structure of the [Nazi] regime, the role of its bureaucracies, and the rivalries between competing power groups ... to trace the early stages of discrimination against Jews and their exclusion from public life that led ultimately to their deaths."--p.vii.

The Road to Auschwitz is the autobiography of Hedi Fried, a fifteen-year-old living in Sighet, Romania, when war breaks out in 1939. In March 1944, Hedi’s family, along with three thousand other Jews from her village, are confined to a ghetto, awaiting shipment to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, amidst the horror, Hedi turns twenty, her sister, Livi, fifteen. As Hedi and Livi will later learn, their parents do not survive. In April 1945, the sisters are transported to Bergen-Belsen, two months before liberation. Upon liberation, Hedi renews her acquaintance with Michael, another survivor from Sighet. They move to Sweden, marry, and eventually have three sons. It is the loss of Michael, when Hedi is only forty, that prompts this memoir. “It took me forty years to realize that I am a witness and that it is my task to tell what I experienced.”

Was the extermination of the Jews part of the Nazi plan from the very start? Arno Mayer offers astartling and compelling answer to this question, which is much debated among historians today.In doing so, he provides one of the most thorough and convincing explanations of how the genocidecame about in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which provoked widespread interest and controversywhen first published. Mayer demonstrates that, while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism was always virulent, it did not becomegenocidal until well into the Second World War, when the failure of their massive, all-or-nothingcampaign against Russia triggered the Final Solution. He details the steps leading up to thisenormity, showing how the institutional and ideological frameworks that made it possible evolved,and how both related to the debacle in the Eastern theater. In this way, the Judeocide is placedwithin the larger context of European history, showing how similar ‘holy causes’ in the past havetriggered analogous – if far less cataclysmic – infamies.

This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.

In Hope, Not Fear Benjamin Blech helps readers approach the end of life with calm. More than six years ago Blech was diagnosed with a fatal illness and given six months to live. Over the course of his career Rabbi Blech had counseled hundreds of people through the losses of loved ones and their own end of life, but when confronted with his own unexpected diagnosis he struggled with mortality in a new way. This personal and heartfelt book shares the answers people grappling with the end of life want to know—from what happens when we die to how we can live fully in the meantime. Drawing insights from many religious traditions as well as near death experiences, Hope, Not Fear shares the wisdom and comfort we all need to view death in an entirely new light.

Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."