Alice Herz-Sommer

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Michał Grynberg

"In the history of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto stands as the enduring symbol of Jewish suffering and heroism. This collective memoir - a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and reports - follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardments of the Polish capital to the razing of the Jewish district. The life of the ghetto appears here in striking detail: the frantic exchange of apartments as the walls first go up; the daily battle against starvation and disease; the moral ambiguities confronting Jewish bureaucracies under Nazi rule; the ingenuity of smugglers; the acts of resistance.". "Written inside the ghetto or in hiding outside its walls, these testimonies preserve voices otherwise consigned to oblivion: a woman doctor whose four-year-old son is deemed a threat to the hideout; a painter determined to complete a mural of Job and his trials; an eleven-year-old girl barely eluding blackmailers on the Aryan side of the city. The range of witnesses reflects the diversity of the ghetto itself, from engineers to shopkeepers, from smugglers to members of the Jewish police."--BOOK JACKET.

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Nahum Kohn and Howard Roiter

Nahum Kohn was a small-town watchmaker from a religious family who made his way from his native Sieradz in Western Poland to the forests of Volhynia where, after many adventures and narrow escapes, he joined the detachment of the famous Soviet partisan, Medvedev. Medvedev created near Rovno an intelligence network for espionage and subversive activities. Kohn was a close collaborator and comrade-in-arms of the legendary Soviet partisan Nikolay Kuznetsov, who used his unusual talent for languages to infiltrate Nazi headquarters.

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Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1922, Lala Weintraub grew up in Lvov, Poland. Her parents were assimilated Jews, and the family lived in a religiously and ethnically mixed neighborhood. When the Nazis came, Lala - who had blond hair and blue eyes - survived by convincing them she was a Christian. This book tells her remarkable story. Lala's Story begins with the 1945 liberation of Katowice, the Polish town where she was living. In the days that followed, Lala's mood swung between euphoria and despair. Believing her entire family to be dead, and having lived under an assumed identity for so long, she had no idea who she was or what to do next. Lala recalls preparing for the Nazi arrival by obtaining forged papers and memorizing Catholic prayers and rituals; she relates how, fiercely determined and greatly aided by her Aryan looks, she managed to convince everyone - German soldiers, interrogators, fellow Poles - that she was a Polish Gentile girl named Urszula Krzyanowska. Within a year after Lvov was captured by the German forces, many of Lala's family members were missing and presumed dead; Lala's Story follows Fishman as she moves from town to town in an effort to avoid the same fate, driven by her fear of being discovered. The book ends by bringing her story up to the present day.

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Roy MacLaren

"During the Second World War, Canadians found themselves behind enemy lines in Europe and Asia. Not all, were ill-fated airmen shot down in the fury of battle. Some were there by design; as volunteers who risked their lives on extremely hazardous assignments." "Almost one hundred Canadians served the Allied forces by passing as locals in occupied countries. At the behest of two British secret services, these men made language and custom their costumes and wove themselves into the social fabric of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Burma, Malaya, and Sarawak. They risked their lives assisting resistance groups on sabotage and ambush missions or in smuggling Allied airmen out of occupied territories. Quiet heroes of the war, these Canadians helped to make the brutal and unrelenting warfare of the underground a potent weapon in the Allied arsenal."--Jacket.