First published in 1958, this raw, devastatingly haunting Holocaust memoir is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's best known work. After the German army invades, they first confine the Jewish community of Sighet, Transylvania, into a ghetto, and then pack them into cattle cars bound for the concentration camps. Fifteen-year-old Eliezer and his f...more
Hannah Arendt’s authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.
In 1944, twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, along with Alfred Wetzler escaped Auschwitz and dictated the Vrba-Wetzler Report, or Auschwitz Protocols, to the Bratislava Jewish Council. The report was then smuggled to Switzerland and eventually reached the U.S. State Department, the Vatican, and the British embassy in Bern. It was also broadcast on the BBC...more
In the Kastner affair, as it is known, a seemingly insignificant refugee from Hungary accuses an important member of David Ben Gurion s Mapai party of collaborating with the Nazis during the murder of Hungarian Jewry. Over 30 years out-of-print, Perfidy is back, with murder, conspiracy and deep betrayal at its disturbing core. Playwright and histor...more
When Hitler announced that the result of the war in Europe would be "the complete annihilation of the Jews," he did so in 1942, not only in public, but before an enormous crowd in Berlin. The Allies heard, but astonishingly, they did not listen. Why?In 1944, Allied reconnaissance pilots, searching out industrial targets in the area, repeatedly phot...more
On 7 April 1944 a Slovakian Jew, Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg), and a fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau. As block registrars both men had been allowed relative (though always risky) freedom of movement in the camp and thus had been able to observe the massive preparations underway at Birkenau of th...more
Cesarani's work tells Eichmann's story and through it the story of the Final Solution, incorporating contemporary scholarship on the origins and implementation of the Nazi genocide.
In 1944, the great "Gold Train" headed west from Budapest, carrying gems, cash, furs, carpets, wedding rings, and even gold teeth -- all possessions stripped from Hungarian Jews before their murder. The Gold Train took on a legendary quality even as it steamed out of the station -- hundreds of millions of dollars in assets were on the move, accompa...more
In the spring of 1944, a group of thirty-two young Palestinian Jews parachuted into Nazi-held Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Their goal was to encourage Jewish resistance where possible and to organize rescue schemes thwarting deportations to the death camps. Linking up in Yugoslavia and impelled by the hope that the Jews trapped in Hungary w...more