holocaust, 1933-1945

Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman provides an account of his experiences trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, and shares excerpts from the diary of a German officer who saved his life.

Contains primary source materials, collected to complement the reading of Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl," that provide information about what was going on in the world outside the secret annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years.

Presents the testimony of twenty-seven people who experienced the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, including resistance fighters, a Jesuit priest, a Hitler Youth member, American soldiers, and camp survivors, covering life in 1930s Europe, the ghettos, hiding, adults' and children's lives in the camps, the death marches, liberation, and coping years and decades afterward.

From 1943 onwards, the SS fulfilled its fantasy of bringing together over forty female musicians from all over Europe to perform in the Auschwitz Orchestra. They were directed by the brilliant violinist Alma Ros?, who owes her own survival to her close blood ties to Gustav Mahler. Eleven of the "Orchestra" are still living, and on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz they met to recall their story and to confront their unique and terrifying position in the history of the Holocaust.

The journal of a Jewish girl in her early teens describing both the joys and torments of daily life, as well as typical adolescent thoughts, throughout two years spent in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Includes review questions.

A woman recalls how she was thrown from a train headed for a Nazi death camp in 1944, raised by someone who risked her own life to save the baby's, and finally found some peace with her own family.

Examines the events of the Holocaust within the context of World War II and Germany's economic and political history, while highlighting the main figures of the time.

Draws from documents declassified over fifty years after the end of World War II to describe and analyze the degree to which the Nazis planned and improvised the Holocaust, the attitudes and participation of ordinary Germans in the killings, and the Western allies' knowledge of and reaction to the extermination of the Jews.

Frankl's elaboration of his theory that man's primary motvational force is the search for meaning.