world war two

This compilation of seven previously published works, edited to form a single narrative, follows the Donovans through four generations of American wars, from World War II to the War in Afghanistan.

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.

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.