Walker (1886-1959) was one of Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted advisors from his election as US president in 1933 until his death in 1945. Originally from Butte, Montana, he was coordinating secretary for the New Deal agencies, Postmaster General during World War II, and national chairman of the Democratic Party. He dictated or wrote his autobiography between 1949 and 1956 but never edited it into finished form, and after his death the manuscript lay in archives at Notre Dame until now. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Threatened with extermination, many Jewish people refused to go passively to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis during World War II and instead put up heroic resistance. Prisoners at Sobibór and Treblinka organized successful revolts, while at Auschwitz they sacrificed their lives to dynamite the crematorium. Beyond the barbed wire of the camps, hundreds of Jewish people were active in the French resistance and thousands fought with partisans in other occupied countries. One and a half million more served in the Allied armed forces. Incredibly, it took the Nazis longer to subdue the forces of the Warsaw ghetto than it had taken them to defeat the Polish army in 1939. This book reveals a little known chapter of history and uncovers many stories of amazing courage in the face of overwhelming odds.

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Memoirs of a Jew born in 1916 in Łuków, Poland, to the Chajt family. Chs. 6-14 (pp. 47-109) relate her experiences in the Holocaust. Under the German occupation of the town, in 1940 she joined a resistance group. In July she was arrested by the Germans and sent to the Lublin Castle prison, but managed to escape a year later, with the help of the Polish underground, and returned to Łuków. Her mother and four of her siblings were deported in May 1942 and killed, and one sister who was pregnant was killed during the roundup. Wrobel survived as a worker of the Dietz poultry factory; she helped her father and four other siblings hide for a while, but they were also eventually killed. During the final roundup in Łuków in May 1943, she and some members of her resistance group hid; afterward they fled to the forest and, as a partisan group, were patronized by the Armia Ludowa. In winter 1944 their camp was attacked by the Armia Krajowa; many Jews were killed and Wrobel was wounded. In summer 1944 the vicinity was liberated by the Soviets. In 1945 Wrobel, married and with a baby, fled to the U.S. occupation zone in Germany; in 1947 they settled in the USA.

Burger's account of his time with the Italian Resistance fighters. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR