Non omnis moriar

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Marco Nahon

"This memoir details the experiences of a Greek Jew in Hitler's concentration camps. Marco Nahon, a physician educated at the University of Beirut, was practicing medicine and living with his family in the small Thracian town of Dhidhimoteichon (Dimotika), already in Nazi hands, when the Germans began rounding up Jews. In 1943, Nahon and his family were deported to Birkenau, the extermination subcamp of Auschwitz, where his wife and young daughter were killed. There he witnessed firsthand the calculated brutality designed by the likes of Eichmann and Speer and implemented by Mengele and others"--Dust jacket.

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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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John Borneman and Jeffrey M. Peck

This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance, who proclaims, "I am a German Jew. I want to live here." Others describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: "I don't have anything in common with the whole German people." Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: "If someone asks me, 'Who are you?' then I can only say, 'I am a fish out of water.'"

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Joe Rosenblum with David Kohn

This is the story of a young man caught in the whirlwind of the Holocaust, who survives a chain of events so harrowing they almost defy belief. As a boy, Joe Rosenblum watches as the Nazi overlords tighten their grip on his small Polish town. Narrowly escaping mass executions that take his own brother, Rosenblum is first sheltered by a local Gentile family, then takes refuge with Russian partisans. Once captured by the Germans, he begins a journey through three concentration camps--Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Dachau. Living by his wits, a courier for the camp underground, Rosenblum is able to help other prisoners, and even to save children selected for the gas chambers. Eventually he finds himself working for the infamous Dr. Mengele. In a bizarre twist of fate, the Angel of Death is persuaded to perform life-saving surgery on Rosenblum--perhaps making him the only Jew to be saved by the deadly doctor's skills. A remarkable man who danced on the razor's edge of history, Rosenblum did not merely survive the Holocaust, but rose above it by radiating hope and humanity--by defying the darkness.