When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, the author and his father were drafted into the Polish Army. After a few days of hopeless fighting, the brigade in which the author served was routed and dispersed. This precipitated a headlong flight of soldiers and civilians alike, anxious to escape the murderous attack of the rapidly advancing enemy armored columns and their attendant aircraft, which ceaselessly bombed and strafed roads and villages. For some three weeks, Aaron Reisfeld and his father desperately sought to escape the Nazi onslaught by fleeing eastward to the Russian border and the perceived safety that country offered. It was a harrowing ordeal covering hundreds of kilometers, during which the Reisfelds endured hunger, exposure, bombing, shelling and countless dangers on roads clogged with millions of terrified, escaping refugees. At the outbreak of war, the author lived a comfortable life in a reasonably affluent home in the town of Lodz, and was about to complete his last year of high school. Little did he know it would be more than a decade before he could complete his education and obtain a degree in textile engineering from Nottingham College in England. In that decade, the author survived many trials by fire and mortal danger, first in escaping from the Nazis, then fighting the Germans in North Africa as a soldier in the British Army, and finally serving in the Israeli Army in that country’s bloody war for independence. While he managed to escape the fires of the Holocaust, his mother, sister and most members of his extended family were consumed in it along with six million Jews and untold numbers of gentiles. Running from the advancing Nazis, the author and his father, through sheer determination, willpower to survive and luck, managed to reach the Russian Zone of Occupation and its temporary safety. Soon, however, they found they had to flee from the Russians as well when they began deporting into the Siberian hinterland capitalists, professionals and the intelligentsia, who were unlikely to hew to the Soviet ideology and order. Fleeing the Russians, the Reisfelds brought off another harrowing escape, this time by crossing a raging river in the middle of a cold, wintry night into Romania, where they hoped to find a temporary haven. Because they had crossed illegally into the country, the author and his father were apprehended by the Romanian police and forced to serve a brief jail sentence before being set free and allowed to stay in that country. From their base in Bucharest, Reisfeld’s father tried to arrange for his mother’s and sister’s escape from Nazi occupied Poland. Such arrangements were difficult to make, but possible by bribing the right police and Nazi officials. Reisfeld’s father succeeded in making those arrangements, and his mother and sister were set to travel to then neutral Italy from where they could continue on to Palestine. But just as they were about to depart, Italy entered the war on Germany’s side, thus trapping them in Poland and sealing their doom. The security they found in Romania did not last as both Germany and the Soviets were poised to march into Romania and partition the country between them. The Reisfelds had to flee once again before they could be overtaken by their dreaded enemies. They managed to book passage on one of the last passenger ships to leave Romania, barely days ahead of the German occupation. After a tour of eastern Mediterranean ports, the Reisfelds finally landed in Haifa where they were taken in by family members already established in Palestine. Yet, this was hardly the end of the author’s peregrinations. With the war raging in North Africa and creeping closer to Palestine, Aaron joined the British Army’s Corp of Royal Engineers as a sapper lifting and planting mines, blowing up fortifications, and building and destroying bridges, among ot

An unforgettable novel from the New York Times bestseller Gordon Korman Link, Michael, and Dana live in a quiet town. But it's woken up very quickly when someone sneaks into school and vandalizes it with a swastika. Nobody can believe it. How could such a symbol of hate end up in the middle of their school? Who would do such a thing? Because Michael was the first person to see it, he's the first suspect. Because Link is one of the most popular guys in school, everyone's looking to him to figure it out. And because Dana's the only Jewish girl in the whole town, everyone's treating her more like an outsider than ever. The mystery deepens as more swastikas begin to appear. Some students decide to fight back and start a project to bring people together instead of dividing them further. The closer Link, Michael, and Dana get to the truth, the more there is to face-not just the crimes of the present, but the crimes of the past. With Linked, Gordon Korman, the author of the acclaimed novel Restart, poses a mystery for all readers where the who did it? isn't nearly as important as the why?

While Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church’s history—for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson’s Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler’s regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance. The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism’s equivalent of the biblical admonition to “render unto Caesar,” a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons’ courage and travails during the war. Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century—and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.

75 years after the end of the Holocaust, this book commemorates the millions of victims by sharing the stories of wartime soccer players, those prisoners of the Nazi regime who found soccer to be a means of survival and inspiration even when surrounded by profound suffering and death. The Holocaust was genocide on a scale never seen before. It is the greatest of human tragedies and a defining event in history which continues to challenge and confound human understanding. For many victims ensnared by Nazi Germany, soccer became both a show of resistance and a matter of life and death. In Soccer under the Swastika: Defiance and Survival in the Nazi Camps and Ghettos, revised edition, Kevin E. Simpson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through this little-known chapter in history, revealing the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World War II. Relying on a trove of recently-translated testimonies and scores of interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, Simpson casts a penetrating light on the darkness of the Holocaust by celebrating the courage of those who found the strength to play the beautiful game under horrific circumstances. With the increasing loss of firsthand memories of these events, Soccer under the Swastika reminds us of the importance in telling these compelling stories. Thoughtfully written and meticulously researched, this revised edition is emboldened by new research, recently translated survivor testimonies, new photos from the era, and a deepened focus on soccer in the Nazi camps and ghettos, providing a more powerful narrative of soccer’s ability to provide inspiration and, at times, sustain life.

At least nine million Americans trace their roots to Poland, and Polish Americans have contributed greatly to American history and society. During the largest period of immigration to the United States, between 1870 and 1920, more Poles came to the United States than any other national group except Italians. Additional large-scale Polish migration occurred in the wake of World War II and during the period of Solidarity's rise to prominence. This encyclopedia features three types of entries: thematic essays, topical entries, and biographical profiles. The essays synthesize existing work to provide interpretations of, and insight into, important aspects of the Polish American experience. The topical entries discuss in detail specific places, events or organizations such as the Polish National Alliance, Polish American Saturday Schools, and the Latimer Massacre, among others. The biographical entries identify Polish Americans who have made significant contributions at the regional or national level either to the history and culture of the United States, or to the development of American Polonia.