The Holocaust

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Robert Marshall

Account of Polish Jews living and surviving in the sewers of Lvov when the Nazis launched the final destruction of the ghetto in May of 1943.

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Dan Stone

520 Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors-their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors' immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead. -- Provided by publisher.

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Steven Weitzman

"The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think the answer to this question can be found in the Bible, others look to archaeology or genetics. Some skeptics have even sought to debunk the very idea that the Jews have a common origin. In this book, Steven Weitzman takes a learned and lively look at what we know - or think we know - about where the Jews came from, when they arose, and how they came to be. Scholars have written hundreds of books on the topic and come up with scores of explanations, theories, and historical reconstructions, but this is the first book to trace the history of the different approaches that have been applied to the question, including genealogy, linguistics, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and genetics. Weitzman shows how this quest has been fraught since its inception with religious and political agendas, how anti-Semitism cast its long shadow over generations of learning, and how recent claims about Jewish origins have been difficult to disentangle from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He does not offer neatly packaged conclusions but invites readers on an intellectual adventure, shedding new light on the assumptions and biases of those seeking answers - and the challenges that have made finding answers so elusive."--Dust jacket.

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Jonathan Wilson

In 1991 a fifty-year-old Englishman, Daniel Weiss, has come to Jerusalem to bury his mother, Esta Weiss, and to see what he can find out about the father he never knew. What he uncovers is the dramatic story of the life of Esta Weiss. In 1941, Esta, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, meets and begins an affair with Archie Rawlins, a twenty-two-year-old army intelligence officer. Their relationship, mutually suspicious and tortured in the beginning, becomes in the end an affair of desperate passion. Esta tells Rawlins that she has been an eyewitness to murder and atrocity. Rawlins passes on the information to his superiors only to discover that they are determined to cover up information concerning the plight of the Jews in Europe. He is also told that Esta may belong to a group of Zionist terrorists responsible for the assassination of a senior British diplomat. Who and what should Rawlins believe? The decision that he makes brings fateful consequences to himself and Esta, whose own secrets turn out to be darker than anything Rawlins could have imagined.