nazi germany

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.

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.

Jean Moulin was a French Resistance hero of World War II. Eventually his whereabouts were betrayed to the Nazis and he was tortured by Klaus Barbie, the infamous "butcher." But who was the enigmatic Moulin really? His story is full of unanswered questions and is far more complicated than is generally known.

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.

Pastor, professor, one of the twentieth century's most brilliant minds--Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also soon to be a martyr. After struggling with the moral issues involved, he had joined the resistance to his country's dictator, Adolf Hitler. Now he was on his way to solitary confinement, bur Bonhoeffer was never truly alone in his concrete cell, because the Lord was with him. Anchoring his daily life in the simple disciplines of Bible study and prayer, he used his time to ponder and write on deep spiritual issues.

An account of one of the defining moments of twentieth-century history : the siege of Leningrad. It began in September of 1941 when Nazi German forces severed the last outside connection to the city. The siege lasted 872 days, during which the dying population suffered horrors beyond the power of description. The author interviewed dozens of survivors to create a deeply personal and universal story of survival in extreme circumstances.

Draws on a wealth of untouched original material such as school assignments, juvenile diaries, and letters, to break the stereotypes of victimhood and trauma to give individual stories of the generation Hitler made.