These memoirs recount the struggle for survival of a middle-class Jewish family during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Inside the Warsaw ghetto, the author witnessed the daily battle against overcrowding, hunger and disease.

Recounts the struggle against the Nazi takeover of Warsaw and provides an account of the author's activities as head courier for the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization.

A blow-by-blow, ground-level account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 2-month Polish Resistance effort to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation. Poland’s most famous post-war poet offers “the finest book about the insurrection of 1944”—an essential read for fans of WW2 history (John Carpenter). On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against 5 years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. 63 days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on. First written over 25 years after the uprising, Białoszewski’s account gives readers an unforgettable sense of the chaos and immediacy of the final days of World War II. He tells of slipping back and forth under German fire, dodging sniper bullets, collapsing with exhaustion, rescuing the wounded, and burying the dead. This unusual memoir is a major work of literature and a reflection on memory that resists the terrible destruction it records. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1977 translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.

Ruth Altbeker Cyprys was a young Jewish lawyer who, together with her child Eva, survived WWII in the most extraordinary circumstances. In this journal, written immediately after the War and then hidden away for nearly 50 years, Cyprys tells about the terrifying deportations that began in 1942, about her own incredible escape with her child from a deportation train en route to Treblinka, and about their subsequent struggle to hide, with the help of Christian Poles. As gripping as a novel, this memoir is not only a record of the horrors of the period but also the tale of a woman of phenomenal courage and tenacity.

This memoir tells the story of young Vladka Meed, sole Holocaust survivor in her family, and relates the harrowing experiences she had while living in the Warsaw ghetto and working for the underground resistance movement.

The memoir that inspired Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning film, which won the Cannes Film Festival's most prestigious prize—the Palme d'Or. Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.