World History: Second World War

Between 1943 and 1945, as the Allies fought their way north against the German invaders and Mussolini's rump Fascist state, thousands of men and women throughout occupied Italy rose up and fought to liberate their country from the German invaders and their Fascist collaborators.

The powerful, heart-breaking memoir of Dita Kraus, THE LIBRARIAN OF AUSCHWITZDita Kraus was born in Prague in 1929 - in her powerful new memoir she writes about her childhood before the war and then during the Nazi-occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto ...at Terezin and from there to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen.
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'It's not always a grim story. Alongside anger and despair there is love and hope. But the message is stark. This is the way bullies work. When Time Stopped is more than just history. It's a warning.' Michael Palin In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the se...crets of her father's past: years spent hiding in plain sight in wartorn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew. In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, travelled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo's eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn't bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father's story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.
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During World War II, Allied bombing obliterated every major German and Japanese city. Based on extensive archival sources, interviews with bombing survivors, airmen, and published first-hand accounts, the book looks at the bombing campaign from an avowedly human perspective - All...ied, German and Japanese.
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In the summer of 1942, twenty-two year-old Franci Rabinek Epstein arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her six-year journey through several camps during the Second World War, from Terezin to Ausc...hwitz-Birkenau, to forced labor in Hamburg and finally Bergen-Belsen. After the camp's liberation by the British in April 1945, she returned to Prague, a survivor. Franci was known in her group as the Prague seamstress. Hers is a story of ingenuity and endurance- she pretended to be an electrican to escape the Auschwitz selection, secretly fighting for the survival of her fellow inmates. Franci also gives voice to the darker side of women in war - rape and prostitiution - offering an insight into the resilience of people in an unknowable situation.
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