Defiance

Author: Nechama Tec
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199744025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims, but in fact many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Tec reveals that this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons, but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.

Brothers in Arms

Author: Peter Duffy
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099445336
Category : Belarus
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
It sounds like something from ancient mythology- three brothers living near the edge of a forest witness the coming of an invading army. They arm themselves, take to their horses and seek refuge in the woods they know as well as they know anything. The enemy arrives and systematically starts killing the long-oppressed minority to which the brothers belong. Horrified and angered, they lead guerrilla attacks against the enemy's installations and exact vicious revenge on local collaborators. Prompted by the eldest, who is selected as commander, the brothers and a growing numbers of warriors begin a campaign to save all their people, including the weak, the young, the old, the sick. Slowly the group evolves into a makeshift forest city with a hospital, workshops, a school and even a bathhouse. When the invading army retreats, the brothers emerge from the woods- the saviours of 1,250 people.

Fugitives of the Forest

Author: Allan Levine
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1461750059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Book Description
The heroic story of Jewish resistance and survival during the Second World War.

The Bielski Brothers

Author: Peter Duffy
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060935537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblings being led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would, of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running or giving in to despair, these brothers -- Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski -- fought back, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis. By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding the Belarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis and established a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to join their ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day, a robust community began to emerge, a "Jerusalem in the woods." After two and a half years in the woods, in July 1944, the Bielskis learned that the Germans, overrun by the Red Army, were retreating back toward Berlin. More than one thousand Bielski Jews emerged -- alive -- on that final, triumphant exit from the woods.

Into the Forest

Author: Rebecca Frankel
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125026765X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

Beyond Courage

Author: Doreen Rappaport
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763629766
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Recounts the efforts of Jews who organized others and sabotaged the Nazis during the Holocaust, including Georges Loinger who smuggled children from occupied France into Switzerland and four brothers who led refugees into the forest to build a village and an army.

Inside a Class Action

Author: Jane Schapiro
Publisher: Terrace Books
ISBN: 0299193330
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
On October 21, 1996, attorney Michael Hausfeld, with a team of lawyers, filed a class-action complaint against Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse on behalf of Holocaust victims. The suit accused the banks of, among other things, acting as the chief financiers for Nazi Germany. On August 12, 1998, the plaintiffs and banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement. Through detailed research, court transcripts, and interviews with politicians, attorneys, historians, and survivors, Jane Schapiro shows how egos, personalities, and values clashed in this complex and emotionally charged case. Inside a Class Action provides an insider's view of a major lawsuit from its inception to its conclusion and will appeal to anyone interested in human rights, reparations, and international law.

The Bielski Brothers

Author: Larry Slawson
Publisher: Larry Slawson via PublishDrive
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 17

Book Description
This book explores the lives and legacy of the Bielski Brothers during World War Two, and their efforts to save nearly 1,200 Jews from Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe.

Hidden

Author: Fay Walker
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299180603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Of the Rosenbluth family, only the older children, Faiga and Luzer, had gone into hiding before the SS rounded up the Jews of Kanczuga, Poland. Hidden is Faiga and Luzer’s story, a memoir whose intimate and quiet particularity makes the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real. In alternating first-person narratives, Faiga (Fay) and Luzer (Leo) take readers into their very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, the once-dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister’s fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler’s only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows’ warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war’s end, back once more into the world—but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confident, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.

Saving One's Own

Author: Mordecai Paldiel
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827612958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 893

Book Description
In this remarkable, historically significant book, Mordecai Paldiel recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which, at great risk to their own lives, Jews rescued other Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing he puts to rest the widely held belief that all Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe wore blinders and allowed themselves to be led like "lambs to the slaughter." Paldiel documents how brave Jewish men and women saved thousands of their fellow Jews through efforts unprecedented in Jewish history. Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One's Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers' dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation. The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy--and in saving literally thousands of Jews--is finally revealed.