On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the United Nations as being on January 27, we pause to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust and to reflect on the stories of resilience, survival, and the enduring impact of this tragedy.
On that very day at 7pm, please join us at the library for the program” Miracle Child: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor in her Own Words” featuring the unique, courageous and uplifting story of Hanna Wechsler — how she survived Auschwitz and went on to thrive and make an impact on others.
It has been almost 80 years since the end of the Holocaust. Today, there are fewer survivors who can tell their stories about the Nazi atrocities. Hanna Wechsler is one of these amazing people.
It took many years before Hanna could talk about her experience. Born in 1936 in a small town in Poland to a Jewish family, she was a young girl when the Nazis tore her and her parents from their lives. When the Germans invaded Poland, the family hid, first in a barn with the help of a Polish family. After hiding for a short while, they lived in a Nazi controlled ghetto and escaped to Hungary before being captured and transported to Auschwitz at the age of six.
She survived that ordeal, as did her parents, and emigrated to Israel in 1948. She studied at Tel Aviv University, met her husband Harry, and moved to the United States in 1968. Hanna became a teacher, and taught Hebrew at Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson for 40 years. After her husband died in 2011, she became a public speaker. She has given testimony to the Shoah Foundation, spoken at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan and to hundreds of adults and school children about her Holocaust experiences. Her memoir, In Spite of It All, tells about how, even in the face of adversity, one can persevere and prevail. Hanna writes: “In Auschwitz, surviving for a day was like surviving for a lifetime.”
Despite the horrors that Hanna experienced, being a witness has been her life calling. She is committed to helping to ensure that her story, and that of the other survivors, is not forgotten and that history will remember the lives of those who suffered.
Here is a selection of new books available to borrow with your Livingston Library card, including inspirational survivor narratives and biographies/memoirs that offer insight into the history, personal experiences, and lessons of the Holocaust.
We invite you to explore these books and deepen your understanding of this dark chapter in history.
Also Here : Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust by Brooke Randel
As a young girl Brooke knew little about the Holocaust-just that it was a catastrophe in which millions were murdered, and that her grandma Golda Indig barely escaped that fate. But her Bubbie never spoke about what happened, and the two spent most of their time together making pleasant memories: baking crescent roll cookies, playing gin rummy, and watching Baywatch. Until an unexpected phone call when Golda said, out of the blue: “You should write about my life. What happened in the war.” What results is a fascinating memoir–about one woman’s harrowing survival, and another’s struggle to excavate the story from under the sands of time, and her grandma’s illiteracy.
Cold Crematorium : Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz by József Debreczeni
The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps. When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”-the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders-anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder-decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die. Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality.
The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust by Elizabeth B. White
The astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg—a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir.
The Escape Artist : The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland
In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz – one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world – and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line. Against all odds, he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen – a forensically detailed report that would eventually reach Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba – then just nineteen years old – had risked everything to deliver. Some could not believe it. Others thought it easier to keep quiet. Vrba helped save 200,000 Jewish lives – but he never stopped believing it could have been so many more.
The Forbidden Daughter : The True Story of the Holocaust Survivor by Zipora Klein Jakob
The unforgettable true story of a girl born in the Kovno Ghetto, and the dangerous risk her parents faced in defying the barbarous Nazi law prohibiting childbirth. When the Nazis raze the entire Kovno Ghetto, Jonah and Tzila are among those killed. Their only child is left orphaned and alone, dependent on the kindness of strangers. Despite her circumstances, Elida grows up, changing families, countries, continents, and even names, countless times. Surviving the war and the Holocaust that stole her parents, the young woman never gives up hope. In her lifelong pursuit to find love and belonging, she works to rebuild her identity and triumph over her terrible circumstances.
Final Verdict : The Holocaust On Trial in the 21st Century by Tobias Buck
The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany–that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people–and a larger exploration of Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today’s rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.
The Forgers : The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation by Roger Moorhouse
Moorhouse unfolds this never-before-told history Holocaust resistance, illuminating the remarkable story of Polish diplomats, Jewish activists, Japanese bureaucrats, and ordinary people the world over who systematically forged as many as 10,000 passports and saved hundreds, potentially thousands, of Jewish lives. Drawing upon first-hand accounts and survivor testimony with new research and revelations about the Lados Group, Moorhouse unspools the lives, work, and valor of Aleksander Lados, Stefan Ryniewicz, Konstanty Rokicki, Juliusz Kuhl, Chaim Eiss, Abraham Silberschein, six members of the Polish government-in-exile who seized an opportunity to do good in the face of a world at war.
The Ghost Tattoo : Discovering the Hidden Truth of My Father’s Holocaust by Tony Bernard
To the outside world, Henry Bernard was a hard-working and beloved family doctor on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Yet he was also a Holocaust survivor whose life was profoundly affected by the experiences of his past. He took extreme steps for his family’s security, keeping a rifle near his bedroom and covering up his family’s Jewish origin. He was obsessed with paying off debt, the German word for debt being the same as the word for ‘guilt’. He kept his striped Auschwitz uniform with a picture of his mother in his wardrobe. These obsessions helped destroy his marriage and restricted any hope he had of conventional domestic happiness. But Henry had a bigger secret and a deeper shame about what he had done during the war. He suffered privately until he began returning to Germany and Poland to confront his past and come to terms with the deaths of his parents and of Halina, the love of his life. This is the story of how Tony Bernard, Henry’s eldest son, went on a forty-year journey with his father to solve the mystery of why Henry was the way he was, and how he finally came to understand the desperate choices Henry had made in the ghetto to try to keep himself and his family alive.
Heavyweight : A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory by Solomon J. Brager
Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’ exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated. Alongside the Levis’ propulsive journey across Europe and to the United States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and connected periods of colonial history.
The Holocaust : A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorials & Museums by Rosie Whitehouse
In recent years, countries once reluctant to delve into the dark corners of their past have begun to document the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Much more than a description of notorious sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Dachau, this unique guide – organised around city hubs in each country – helps visitors explore numerous destinations across Europe, both well known and comparatively unexpected. It includes new ground-breaking museums and memorials that tell us as much about the present as they do the past. Expert historical context is provided for each region, as well as in its own dedicated chapter, along with suggestions for places to eat and stay and tips on how to pace potentially difficult journeys into Europe’s sombre past.
The Holocaust : An Unfinished History by Dan Stone
Spanning the entirety of the Holocaust, this sweeping history deepens our understanding. Stone-Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London-reveals how the idea of “industrial murder” is incomplete: many were killed where they lived in the most brutal of ways. He outlines the depth of collaboration across Europe, arguing persuasively that we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as an exclusively German project. He also considers the nature of trauma the Holocaust engendered, and why Jewish suffering has yet to be fully reckoned with. And he makes clear that the kernel to understanding Nazi thinking and action is genocidal ideology, providing a deep analysis of its origins.
Irena’s Gift : An Epic World War II Memoir of Sisters, Secrets and Survival by Karen Kirsten
In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten’s mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After Karen eventually discovered the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, she travelled the globe to uncover her family’s past and to find the answers to baffling questions-why did her adoptive grandmother treat Karen’s mother so unkindly? Why did she hide the truth that she was her mother’s aunt? And why, if she appeared to dislike Karen’s mother, did she risk her life to save her and bring her to Australia?
Let’s Make Things Better : A Holocaust Survivor’s Message of Hope and Celebration of Life by Gidon Lev
Lev is also a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned for nearly four years in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Liberated when he was ten, he lost at least twenty-six members of his family in the Holocaust, including his father, grandfather, aunts and uncles. After decades of silence, Gidon first told his story of being imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp at age six to a group of German high school students. What followed was nothing less than extraordinary: from that one talk, Gidon has spoken to celebrities and diplomats, took social media by storm, all with his signature bluntness, charm, and wisdom. Gidon’s life is extraordinary not only because he is one of the few living survivors, but because of his lessons learned over nearly a century.
My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds by Hannah Pick-Goslar
Holocaust survivor Hannah shares an intimate look into her life and friendship with Anne Frank.
Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz : A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma and Inheritance by Ari Richter
Part travelogue, part memoir, part historic retelling, Richter recreates his family’s journey leading up to and extending beyond the Holocaust. Relying on extensive genealogical research and his family’s archiving, Richter illustrates the lives of his grandparents while reflecting on the burden of a storyteller to carry on these legacies. It is a rare glimpse into the firsthand stories of both Holocaust survivors and their descendants, told as an intertwined tapestry of faith, grief, and ultimately, survival.
No Road Leading Back : An Improbable Escape From the Nazis and the Tangled Way we Tell the Story of the Holocaust by Chris Heath
The remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the pits where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941, and where they were forced participants in the equally horrific aftermath: anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor-an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives and their acts of witness, as well as providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told, and never accurately.
One Life: The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton and the Prague Kindertransport by Barbara Winton
Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. Most never saw their parents again. This is his story. Over 6,000 people are alive today because of his efforts. What motivated an ordinary man to do something so extraordinary? This book, written by his daughter, Barbara, explores the 106-year life of an incredible humanitarian, a man whose legacy only came to public light decades later. His life story is a clarion call to choose action over apathy in the face of injustice, and a reminder that every one of us can change the world.
Two Wheels to Freedom : The Story of a Young Jew, Wartime Resistance, and a Daring Escape by Arthur J. Magida
Though Cioma Schonhaus was only 11 years old when the Nazis first came to power, his cleverness and resourcefulness eventually made him an unlikely hero and bon vivant. As a young adult staying one step ahead of the S.S., Cioma would dine in swanky restaurants and frequent trendy bars and have plenty of romances–all while sabotaging weapons in the munitions factory where he worked. He even bought a sailboat and taught himself how to sail. These hijinks never distracted Cioma from a deeper mission. Trained as an artist, Cioma’s masterfully forged fake IDs ensured that several hundred Jews survived the war. When he learned the Gestapo was closing in on him, Cioma masterminded a singularly daring escape: spending a month biking to Switzerland, he became the only person to cycle his way out of the Third Reich.
Unearthed : A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Meryl Frank
In this mystery woven into a family memoir and a timely history of hatred and resistance, the author seeks the truth about her cousin, a star of Vilna’s Yiddish theater before WWII, as well as the answer to the question of how the next generation should honor the memory of the Holocaust.
–Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian