world war ii

As the second world war ended, some 25,000 Jews, entire families in some cases, walked out of the forests of Eastern Europe. For three years these people had miraculously survived, eluding Nazi hunts and the Soviet, Polish, and Ukranian partisans who often killed first and asked questions later.

Rita Lurie was five years old when she was forced to hide from the Nazis in a cramped, dark attic with fourteen members of her family. She watched her younger brother and her mother die before her eyes, but she survived. Decades later Rita's daughter, Leslie, began probing the traumatic events of her mother's childhood to discover how Rita's pain has affected not only Leslie's life and outlook but that of her own daughter, Mikaela, as well.

On a day in May 1941, in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, France, Pierre Seel was summoned by the Gestapo and transported to a concetration camp because he was a homosexual.

Military historian Patrick K. O'Donnell has written an adventure story packed with action, suspense, intrigue, romance, and an unforgettable cast of characters. A small team of Americans parachuted into Italy behind enemy lines with the intent to link up with partisans and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass which was the Nazi supply route through the Alps.

When the Allies stormed Berlin in 1945, Adolf Eichmann, the operator of the Final Solution, which used the concentration camps to kill millions, shed his SS uniform and vanished. Bringing him to justice required a fifteen-year chase by Nazi hunters and the Israeli Secret Service. The chase stretched from Europe to the shores of Argentina. When he was captured Israeli agents smuggled him out of Argentina to his trial in Israel.

Kristallnacht "night of broken glass", was one of the seminal events in Hitler's goal to destroy Europe's Jews. On this night Jewish shops, homes, businesses, and synagogues were destroyed and German Jewish children, in a single day, saw their well-ordered world destroyed.

At the height of World War II, a small group of Jews who were American citizens, having themselves barely escaped the Nazi regime, did the unthinkable: they went back and took on a perilous covert mission to strike at the Third Reich behind enemy lines.

An American heiress turned resistance hero, Muriel Gardiner impressed everyone she met with her beauty, intelligence, and powerful personality. Her adventurous life led her from Chicago's high society to a Viennese medical school, from Sigmund Freud's inner circle to the Austrian underground. Over the years she saved anti-fascists and countless Jews from the Holocaust, providing shelter and documents ensuring their escape.

Rasia Kliot survived the Holocaust on a false identity. Her daughter, Helen Mitsios was born in Montreal, Canada. Together they examine the long-term implications of being a Holocaust survivor and the unique pressures and anxieties the children of Holocaust survivors face. Rasia converted to Christianity and raised her daughter in the Catholic faith, forbidding her to speak of her Jewish identity. Addressing the complicated mother-daughter relationship, this memoir also follows Helen on her journey to Judaism and the acceptance of her cultural and religious heritage.