prisoners and prisons, german

"In this . . . narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names-like the indomitable Pat Reid-share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war's arc from within Colditz's stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler's war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis"--Provided by publisher.

"The Nine follows the true story of the author's great aunt Helene Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris. The nine women were all under thirty when they joined the resistance. They smuggled arms through Europe, harbored parachuting agents, coordinated communications between regional sectors, trekked escape routes to Spain and hid Jewish children in scattered apartments. They were arrested by French police, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. They were subjected to a series of French prisons and deported to Germany. The group formed along the way, meeting at different points, in prison, in transit, and at Ravensbr?ck. By the time they were enslaved at the labor camp in Leipzig, they were a close-knit group of friends. During the final days of the war, forced onto a death march, the nine chose their moment and made a daring escape. Drawing on research, this . . . narrative is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times"--Provided by publisher.

The author, an Italian citizen of the Jewish race, provides an account of his ten months at Auschwitz, where he was sent in 1943 after being deported from his native Turin.

"On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his 44th combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 150 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's [book] tells this largely untold and ... true story"--.

A biography of Noor Inayat Khan, the daughter of an Indian mystic living in France who would become a secret agent for the British in occupied France during World War II.

"Autobiography addressing the author's childhood experience of inner spiritual vision after becoming blind as a boy, his forming a boys' resistance group in occupied Paris at age seventeen (which later merged with D?fense de la France), and his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp"--Provided by publisher.

Combines the diaries and memoirs of Virginia D'Albert-Lake to describe the anti-Nazi French Resistance member's World War II experiences in France and a prison camp.

"Part contemporary detective story, part World War II historical narrative, [a young reader's adaptation of] . . . the inspiring true story of Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville-born enlistee who risked his life during the treacherous final days of World War II to save others from murderous Nazis, and the lasting effects his actions had on thousands of lives--then and now"--Provided by publisher.

A nonfiction graphic work of the story of men who tunneled to escape a German prisoner-of-war camp. Learn about the planners, task leaders, and key players of the escape from Stalag Luft III"--.