Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust Despite the Nazi oppression of all Jews in the lands under their control, Judith Sternberg Newman and her family were hugely fortunate to have managed get permission to settle in Paraguay in 1940. However their escape was blocked by the German authorities who refused to provide an exit visa, from that moment on, as the author notes, “fate turned against us”. As the author relates in these horrific memoirs are the torments, brutality and death at Auschwitz; the treatment that left here by the end of the war as the only surviving member of her family. She emigrated to America in 1947 where she was able to practise at her chosen profession in nursing and raise a family.

A shocking account of Nazi genocide and the inhuman conditions in Auschwitz, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief with which the revelations were met. “Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews.... No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them.”—Sir Martin Gilbert Together with another young Slovak Jew Rudolf Vrba, both deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence – a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The book is cast in the form of a novel to allow information not personally collected by the two fugitives but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. From the Introduction by Dr. Robert Rozett Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. [...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans.

Leslie Schwartz, born in Hungary in 1930, is a teenage survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. He lost his entire immediate family in the Holocaust. His lifelong search for wholeness led him back to Germany, where his dream now is to leave a legacy of healing and conflict resolution. In 2013, Schwartz will be awarded Germany's highest civilian honor - The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Book jacket.

Escaping Hell is the compelling and true story of a heroic young Polish officer who survived the terror of five years in the prisons of Auschwitz and Buchenwald – where violence was meaningless because human life had lost all value. During World War II, Kon Piekarski was a member of the Polish Underground Army, a clandestine resistance movement which operated even inside Auschwitz – organizing spectacular escapes, operating a secret radio network and matching wits with the Gestapo. After Auschwitz, Piekarski became a prisoner of war at Buchenwald and spent time working in a factory where Russian prisoners of war were used for labour. In the face of constant danger, he and his comrades took every possible opportunity to sabotage the German war industry. He was finally transferred to a small camp near the French border, and escaped three months before the end of the war.

Asserts that humor is a form of resistance and a means of psychological survival in threatening situations, and has always been cultivated especially by Jews. Cites reports of humor by both Jews and non-Jews in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe, in the ghettos and the concentration camps, and quotes many jokes. also surveys anti-Nazi jokes, cartoons, and satirical books and films issued abroad and after the war.

A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorized in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."

"I was stubborn. I didn't want to stay in Auschwitz. I didn't want to go to the gas chambers. I didn't want to be cremated. I didn't want to die there, and I kept pushing back."

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine. Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a ‘Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the ‘special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies. Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, ‘Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, including the revolt of October 1944. It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale - but, as a member of a ‘Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.