Growing up Jewish in the little town, or shtetl, of Eisiskes near the Polish-Lithuanian border, Leon Kahn experienced a peaceful childhood until September 1, 1939 when Hitler’s forces attacked Poland. Only sixteen years of age, Kahn watched as the women and children of his community were herded into a gravel pit and murdered. Realizing that to stay meant certain death, Kahn tore off his yellow star of David identifying him as a Jew, and fled with his father, brother and sister to the Polis...

"It’s a welcome surprise to read this careful look by a music historian at Graceland, Paul Simon’s 1986 masterpiece: By bringing both its beauty and its uglier aspects into the light, Kahn, far from ruining the album’s strange magic, lets readers appreciate its intricacies and paradoxes all the more." —The New York Times (Editors' Choice)In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal crossroads. His new marriage was failing and hi...

Holocaust survivor HENRY MELNICK was born in Lodz, Poland. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, he was sent to do slave labour in the Nowy Sacz and Tarnow Ghettos and at Szebnie camp. He was then transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen death camps. When his parents were murdered in the Belzec death camp, he became the sole survivor of his entire family.After liberation, Henry volunteered for the Israeli Army and fought for Israel's inde...

William & Rosalie is the gripping and heartfelt account of two young Jewish people from Poland who survive six different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the me...

He evaded death so many times it seemed it would never take him. The only man in history to go to Auschwitz as a volunteer, to form a resistance movement and document German atrocities. One of the few who succeeded in escaping. He sent drawings from there to his children and wrote letters to his wife, delivering them via the underground conspiracy along with reports. The British historian Michael Foot included him among the six most courageous people of the Second World War. After the war ...

Faye Schulman was a happy teenager learning to become a photographer when the Nazis invaded her small town on the Russian-Polish border. She had a loving family, good friends and neighbours, most of whom were soon lost in the horrors of the Holocaust. But Faye survived, and the photographs she took testify to her experiences and the persecution she witnessed. Decorated for heroism by several governments, Schulman, now in her eighties, tells an extraordinary story not just of survival but o...

WINNER of CBC Canada ReadsIn the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz comes a bestselling new memoir by Canadian survivorFinalist for the 2017 RBC Taylor PrizeMore than 70 years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, a new Canadian Holocaust memoir details the rural Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau, back-breaking slave labour in Auschwitz I...

Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.

I Shall Live tells the gripping true story of a Jewish family in Germany and Russia as the Nazi party gains power in Germany. When Henry Orenstein and his siblings end up in a series of concentrations camps, Orenstein's bravery and quick thinking help him to save himself and his brothers from execution by playing a role in the greatest hoax ever pulled on the upper echelons of Nazi command.Orenstein's lucid prose recreates this horrific time in history and his constant stru...

Survive. At any cost. 10 concentration camps. 10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine surviving. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face. As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner -- his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087. He is forced from on...

If you ever hear old folk moaning on about the world today, just remind them how woeful things were in World War II. When Hitler's horrid army were goose-stepping round the globe, nearly everything in Europe was totally AWFUL!

Following the success of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Lyn Smith visits the oral accounts preserved in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, to reveal the sheer complexity and horror of one of human history's darkest hours.The great majority of Holocaust survivors suffered considerable physical and psychological wounds, yet even in this dark time of human history, tales of faith, love and courage can be found. As well as revealing the story of the Holocaust as direct...