world war 1939-1945

In 1940, Bill Ash sacrificed his American citizenship to join in the fight against Hitler. He flew Spitfires for Britain as a fighter pilot. Shot down over France in March 1942, he evaded capture for months before being betrayed. Tortured and sentenced to death he was saved from the firing squad by the Luftwaffe and by Stalag Luft III, the "Greaf Escape" prison camp. He attempted over a dozen break-outs and is one of the war's greatest escapees.

Gail Lumet Buckley is the daughter of Lena Horne. Starting with her great-great-grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who became a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, she follows two branches of the family: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn. From Atlanta during the Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, to world wars and the civil rights movement, her family participated in the most crucial turning points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dina Gold grew up in Britain hearing tales of her Wolff great-great grandparent's, great-grandparent's and grandparent's glamorous lives in pre-Nazi Berlin. Her family owned a very successful fur business and built a huge building in 1909 at Krausenstrasse 17/18 in Berlin. Once the Nazis came to power all that disappeared, and, like so many other Jewish families, Dina wondered what had become of her family's lawful assets. Her search was stymied for years because the building was in East Berlin. Once the Berlin Wall fell, she began her quest for justice. And there was a bonus to her years of successful research---historians did not know much about the Jews' lives in pre-Nazi Berlin and were anxious to hear her story, see her photographs, and look at her research.

For more than twenty-five years the March of the Living in Poland has brought together survivors and students from all over the world to ensure that firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are not lost. As they walk through concentration camps, ghettos, and towns depleted of Jewish communities, a special bond forms as the original witnesses to the Holocaust pass their mantle to a new generation whose task it is to remember what they hear and see. Although Jews were the largest group slated for extermination, the Nazis also killed those who differed with Nazi beliefs: trade unionists, Communists, homosexuals, Roma (gypsies), Russian POW's, and the disabled. But the Jewish people alone were ultimately subjected to the goal of total annihilation.

On April 29, 1945, the forward battalions of Rainbow Division, 42nd Infantry, were moving swiftly toward Munich. They had survived four months of costly and bitter combat. They were optimistic and confident as the war was coming to an end. Amost half of the soldiers were eighteen to twenty years old. And then their road led to the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp. To the horrors of war they added the horrors of Dachau. This book honors the memories of the American liberators whose lives were forever changed by what they saw on April 29, 1945. The editor of the book was a Rainbow soldier.

Ten-year-old Lazorek Hershenfi survived the Nazis and the death camps. Eventually he began a new life in Palestine, taking the name of Eliezer Ayalon. Like other survivors, he shares his story so that the events of the Holocaust may never be repeated.

Among the millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka shared a secret---they were pregnant. Separated from their husbands they were scared. After losing so much to the Nazis, they were determined to hold on to their unborn babies. Against all odds, the three women survived, gave birth under horrible circumstances, and went on to build new lives with their children after World War II. Their stories of hardships and miracles almost defy belief. Sixty-five years later, the three "miracle babies" (two girls and a boy) share the story of their mothers who defied death at the hands of the Nazis to give their children life.

Shortly before Christmas in 1943, five Army aviators left Alaska on a routine flight to test their hastily retrofitted B-24 Liberator. The mission ended in a crash that claimed all lives but one---a city kid from Philadelphia with no wilderness experience. With only a parachute for cover and an old Boy Scout knife in his pocket, he found himself alone in subzero temperatures.

Kari Rosvall's early life was shrounded in mystery until, at age 64, she received a letter through the post. In it was a photograph of herself as a young baby---the only one she had ever seen. Kari soon learned that she was a Lebensborn child, part of Hitler's program which encouraged Nazi soldiers to have children with Scandinavian women in order to create an Aryan race. And so began a journey back to her roots in Norway, where she was taken from her mother and sent to Germany in a crate to join other Lebensborn children. In post-war Germany she was rescued by the Red Cross from an attic.