world war ii

When the Japanese entered the war in 1941, some 20,000 British civilians were living in Asia. They were rounded up and marched to concentration camps where they remained for three years. Over 3,000 of them were children. Living in the era of European colonialism, these children had their world suddenly and brutally shattered.

In November 1943 five American airmen flying the dangerous Himalayan supply route were caught in a violent storm and blown far off their intended course. Bailing out just seconds before their plane ran out of fuel, they found themselves in the heart of Tibet. They were among the first Americans to enter the Forbidden City of Lhasa and the last to see it before the Chinese invasion.

Roman Halter was a Polish schoolboy in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Within days his family's home was seized and he had become the slave of the local SS chief. He survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, Stutthof concentration camp, and a slave factory in Dresden, Germany. When he returned to his village after the war, he found it was nothing like the home he remembered.

In 1944, thirteen-year-old Fritz Tubach was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village. That same year, in a Hungarian village, twelve-year-old Bernie Rosner was loaded onto a train, with the rest of the village's Jewish inhabitants, and taken to Auschwitz where his whole family was murdered. Both men survived the war and many years later, after enjoying successful careers in California, they met, became friends, and decided to share their stories.

The genocide of the Gypsies by the Nazis has not received that much attention. After the final liberation of the death camps in 1945, Gypsy survivors did not commit their stories to paper but, in most cases, tried to forget the horrors they had experienced. A few passed on their accounts by word of mouth. The authors of this book first began to assemble documentation and gather eyewitness accounts in 1969 in order to support claims for reparations. In the years since, more stories have emerged. Some Gypsies fought with the partisans and some non-Gypsies tried to protect them at the risk of their own lives.

Helene Berr died in the Holocaust but from April 1942 to February 1944 she kept a journal of her life in Nazi-occupied France. On her twenty-third birthday she and her parents were taken to Auschwitz where her parents died within six months. Helene was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen where she died in April 1945, just days before British troops arrived to liberate the camp.

On the eve of the Nazi invasion in 1940 Belgium was essentially a Catholic country. Because the church was involved in so many organizations, the Nazis left the church alone. Consequently many of Belgium's Jews turned to the church for help. With a single exception, Belgium's cardinals and bishops did not extend their hand but the lower orders, parish priests and nuns, spontaneously did as much as they could.