When I was a child, I found myself suddenly fascinated by World War II after reading a Classics Illustrated comic that detailed the history of the war. I remember asking myself, “How could this happen? How could Hitler have exerted such control and power?” Years later, I found myself wanting to write a novel about the Holocaust, but I was shamed and awed by the work of those who had lived through it. Despite that, I kept reading about the war and learning its history. The Taster grew out of all the research I’d done over the years.
A young German woman finds a precarious haven closer to the source of danger than she ever imagined—one that will propel her through the extremes of privilege and terror under Hitler’s dictatorship.
In early 1943, Magda Ritter’s parents send her to Bavaria, hoping to keep her safe from the Allied bombs strafing Berlin. After an interview with the civil service, Magda is assigned to the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat. Weeks later, she learns she will be one of the Führer’s food tasters, a job that could kill her. Her love for an SS conspirator draws Magda into a plot that will test her wits and loyalty in a quest for safety, freedom, and ultimately, vengeance.
I have used this book as a reference for all my novels that deal with Nazi Germany. It is a thick, coffee-table-sized book, that, by chance, I found years ago on the “reduced” shelf in a local bookstore. The chronicle isn’t for the faint of heart. It explains the rise of National Socialism and the ensuing Holocaust in graphic words and pictures, and will leave its indelible imagery firmly entrenched in your memory. It takes you from the roots of the Holocaust to its disturbing aftermath, years after the war.
The Holocaust Chronicle, written and fact-checked by top scholars, recounts the long, complex, anguishing story of the most terrible crime of the 20th century.
The mission of The Holocaust Chronicle is to report the facts, clearly and free of bias or agenda.
The 3000-item timeline of Holocaust-related events is unprecedented in its scope and ambition and detailed caption-text is rich with facts and human interest.
Featured are more than 2000 photographs selected after intensive research in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as other archives and private…
No historian or student of history can ignore the monumental effort of William L. Shirer and his twelve-hundred-page opus on National Socialism. This work starts with the birth of the Third Reich and ends with its last days. In these pages, the reader will find every major and minor personage who populated World War II. Although the Holocaust isn’t mentioned by name in the Index, many of the concentration and extermination camps, and other Nazi atrocities, are examined. This outstanding book is a must for anyone who wants to understand how the Nazis came to power, and how they wielded it once they were in control. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich lays the historical foundation for the Holocaust.
It was Hitler's boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Instead it lasted only twelve. But into its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known.
William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. He was also present at the Nuremberg trials.
First published sixty years ago, Shirer's account of the years 1933-45, when the Nazis, under the rule of their despotic leader Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany is held up as a classic…
A longtime friend introduced me to this novel after he found out that I had some interest in the subject. I’m so glad he did because, after the first reading, I’ve never forgotten it. This slim volume is a masterpiece of deft description and character development. A resort town, somewhere near Vienna, is peopled with colorful residents, tourists, and later the forced resettlement of Jews. “The light stood still. There was a frozen kind of attentiveness in the air. An alien orange shadow gnawed stealthily at the geranium leaves.” Such is Appelfeld’s sparse, beautiful prose. Disaster looms, tension builds, and people disappear...slowly, inexorably. The chilling ending is a tour de force of writing.
A small masterpiece of world literature, set in Europe months before the Nazis began their rise.
It is spring 1939. And Badenheim, a resort town vaguely in the orbit of Vienna, is preparing for its summer season. The vacationers arrive as they always have, a sampling of Jewish middle-class life: the impresario Dr. Pappenheim, his musicians, and their conductor; the bubbly Frau Tsauberblit; the historian, Dr. Fussholdt, and his much younger wife; the “readers,” twins with a passion for Rilke; a child prodigy; a commercial traveler; a rabbi.
The list of guests grows longer as the summer goes on. Receiving…
This novel was recently discovered in German archives and published again after years of obscurity. Otto Silbermann, a Berlin businessman, a fighter in The Great War, finds himself under attack by Nazi storm troopers in November of 1938. Forced to act quickly, his choices limited by draconian National Socialist laws, he decides the best way to avoid arrest while running for his life, is to travel by train. Absurdist, surreal, and filled with acerbic humor, The Passenger conveys the sense of dread, the isolation, and the feeling of being chased by death as well as any novel written about the Holocaust. The author was killed at the age of twenty-seven when the ship he was traveling on was torpedoed by a German submarine.
Berlin, November 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed.
Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home.
Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at…
There are books that make their mark and are never forgotten. Night is one of these. Elie Wiesel describes the tragic journey that his family took from their home to the ghetto, to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel’s account describes the horrific details of the camps: the selections, the struggle to survive, the crushing work, the deaths that become commonplace as the body and soul struggle to understand the terror. The horrors of the Holocaust come to life in Night.
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and history that laid tracks for the North America of today.
Leaving behind ancestral Chinese homelands and their family, brothers Yang and Lee face harrowing challenges as they join countless immigrants seeking a better life in the 1860s.
This story follows their remarkable journey across the ocean to San Francisco, then into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where they'll labor to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Surrounded by California's new marvels, and carrying their cultural traditions in their hearts, Yang and Lee find themselves in precarious situations. Their passions, struggles, dreams, and…
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