Zvi Helmut Steinitz Memoirs for eternal remembrance For years I was preoccupied with the thought of documenting the tragic fate of my family members, all of them perished in the Holocaust. Yet for almost my whole life, I tried to suppress the sorrowful past, wary of resurrecting the years of tears and suffering. I rarely spoke of the wartime atrocities. I never returned to the country where death resided, where streams of Jewish blood saturated the earth. I couldn ́t bring myself to stand before the silent mass grave in Belzec, where my parents, my brother and my aunt lie buried together with hundreds upon thousands of Jewish victims. I couldn ́t face the death of those I loved, couldn't look into their eyes. In my mind, they live on. Many years later, vivid images from the monstrous war years began to appear frequently, images that cast a shadow over my day-to-day life and burdened my mind. I gradually became aware of my age, too. I was no longer young, and already I felt under pressure to finally write down the story of my family. All my life I had been haunted by the question of how I had survived the war, where I had drawn the mental and physical strength that helped me to survive those tortuous years. There is no explanation for my survival, and yet I am certain that the upbringing that my parents gave me had a significant influence on my steadfastness and determination, particularly in critical situations. My parents brought my brother and me up with love and human values that I have carried with me through my life. In moments of deepest despair and deadly peril, hidden strengths awakened in me, strengths that sharpened my senses and saved my life. I strongly believe that the values installed in childhood will always stay with a person and develop into principles that a young person can take into independent life. Had I not possessed these principles, not even blind luck or sheer coincidence could have saved me. As the only surviving member of my family, I felt a moral obligation to immortalise in writing the fate of my family and their lives before and during the war up until their tragic deaths. I had the extraordinary fortune of surviving, and I have enough mental strength today to enable me to address the horrors of that time and to tell the story of my family. The Nazis will not succeed in their appalling attempt at erasing my family's existence from this earth. My parents and brother have no personal graves and no gravestone.

Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust Despite the Nazi oppression of all Jews in the lands under their control, Judith Sternberg Newman and her family were hugely fortunate to have managed get permission to settle in Paraguay in 1940. However their escape was blocked by the German authorities who refused to provide an exit visa, from that moment on, as the author notes, “fate turned against us”. As the author relates in these horrific memoirs are the torments, brutality and death at Auschwitz; the treatment that left here by the end of the war as the only surviving member of her family. She emigrated to America in 1947 where she was able to practise at her chosen profession in nursing and raise a family.

In this book, child Survivors of the Holocaust who also endured sexual abuse bravely discuss their stories of suffering and hope. Dr. Lev-Wiesel and Dr. Weinger skillfully place these stories in a psychological context, enabling readers to fully take in these Survivors' powerful voices.

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in which German authorities ransacked Jewish-owned buildings with sledgehammers. Ross was eight years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish village, forcing his family to flee. He spent his next six years in a day-to-day struggle to survive the notorious camps in which he was imprisoned, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau among them. When he was finally liberated, he no longer knew how old he was, he was literally starving to death, and everyone in his family except for his brother had been killed. Ross learned in his darkest experiences--by observing and enduring inconceivable cruelty as well as by receiving compassion from caring fellow prisoners--the human capacity to rise above even the bleakest circumstances. He decided to devote himself to underprivileged youth, aiming to ensure that despite the obstacles in their lives they would never experience suffering like he had. Over the course of a nearly forty-year career as a psychologist working in the Boston city schools, that was exactly what he did. At the end of his career, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a site millions of people including young students visit every year. Equal parts heartrending, brutal, and inspiring, From Broken Glass is the story of how one man survived the unimaginable and helped lead a new generation to forge a more compassionate world.

"Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." - Sir Martin Gilbert "Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. ...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." - From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett] Together with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return. Ewald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp’s three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell’s Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp’s family on his father’s side died in the Holocaust. His mother’s side of the family, numbering thirty people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Without exception they escaped the Final Solution. Hell’s Traces tells the story of the two families’ divergent paths. To spark the past to life, he embarks on a journey to visit Holocaust memorials throughout Europe. “Could a stone pillar or a bronze plaque or whatever else constitutes a memorial,” he asks, “cause events that took place more than seven decades ago to appear vivid?” A memorial in Warsaw that includes a boxcar like the ones that carried Jews to Auschwitz compels Ripp to contemplate the horror of Alexandre’s transport to his death. One in Berlin that invokes the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s allows him to better understand how his mother’s family escaped the Nazis. In Paris he stumbles across a playground dedicated to the memory of the French children who were deported, Alexandre among them. Ultimately, Ripp sees thirty-five memorials in six countries. He encounters the artists who designed the memorials, historians who recall the events that are memorialized, and survivors with their own stories to tell. Resolutely unsentimental, Hell’s Traces is structured like a travelogue in which each destination enables a reckoning with the past.