Holocaust Survivor Memoirs
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In Search of Light
by Martha Salcudean
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Martha Salcudean is ten years old when her childhood comes to an abrupt end. The war has been raging around her for years, but in Northern Transylvania, now a part of Hungary, the atrocities intensify with the Nazi invasion in 1944. Suddenly, Martha and her family are imprisoned in ghettos and surrounded by incomprehensible cruelty. As she and her family are lined up in front of a cattle car train, a split-second decision her father makes changes their fate in an instant, instead of heading to almost certain death in Auschwitz, Martha and her family become destined to be saved by Rudolf Kasztner, a man riskily negotiating with the Nazis. After the war, Martha returns home, only to be caught in the grip of a new Communist dictatorship. Martha's journey “In Search of Light” takes her through the darkness of two oppressive regimes to the beginning of freedom in Canada, where she is finally able to choose her own path.
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Carry the Torch / A Lasting Legacy
by Sam Weisberg
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In the Krakow-Plaszow forced labour camp, both Johnny and Sam quickly learn of the brutality of the new commandant, Amon Göth. At sixteen years old, both feel like they are walking a tightrope, where one wrong move can make them the target of Göth's unpredictable volatility. Carry the Torch and A Lasting Legacy are the different yet parallel stories of two men who, as the sole survivors of their immediate families, must find their own way after the war and decide whether to keep their histories in the past.
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Little Girl Lost
by Betty Rich
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zduńska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. After the war, Betty and her husband fled from the Polish Communist regime and eventually immigrated to Toronto. Rich's poetic memoir, Little Girl Lost, is "a montage of graphic snapshots and moments in motion... both testimony and a meditation on what it meant to her sense of self to endure and survive as a young woman growing into adulthood in exile."
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Six Lost Years
by Amek Adler
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
"How much longer could we last?" sixteen-year-old Amek Adler laments, after arriving at yet one more concentration camp in the spring of 1945. From the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos to the Radom forced labor camp, and from the Natzweiler concentration camp to Dachau, Amek has witnessed too much destruction and tragedy to bear any more suffering. To hold onto hope for his survival, he dreams of the life he had with his parents and three brothers, reminiscing about holidays, social events, and dinners; he dreams of a life without pain and starvation; and he dreams of the future. When Amek is finally liberated, he is determined to embrace all the opportunities that freedom offers.
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Traces of What Was
by Steve Rotschild
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Ten-year-old Steve Rotschild learns to hide, to be silent, to be still — and to wait. He knows the sound of the Nazis' army boots and knows to hold his breath until their footsteps recede. Rotschild takes us on a captivating journey through his wartime childhood in Vilna, eloquently juxtaposing his past, furtive walks outside the ghetto with his long, liberating walks through Toronto fifty years after the war. Vividly evoking his experiences, this story of survival and a mother's tenacious love leaves the reader indelibly marked by Traces of What Was.
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If, By Miracle
by Michael Kutz
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Nearly buried alive, ten-year-old Michael Kutz narrowly escaped the Nazi death squad that killed 4,000 Jews, including his own family, in his hometown of Nieśwież. Guided by his mother's last words and determined to survive, he became the youngest member of a partisan resistance group in the dense Belorussian forest, and took part in daring operations against the Nazis and their collaborators
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In Fragile Moments / The Last Time
by Zsuzsanna Fischer Spiro
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Born two hundred kilometres away from each other and two years apart, Zsuzsanna Fischer and Eva Steinberger are both thrown into chaos when Germany occupies Hungary and destroys their peaceful childhoods. In the spring of 1944, as Zsuzsanna and Eva are sent into ghettos and then to Auschwitz, they each take refuge in the one constant in their lives — their older sisters. A glimpse into the fierceness of a sister's love, In Fragile Moments and The Last Time mirror the remarkable differences of similar paths of survival.
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Album of My Life
by Ann Szedlecki
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Ann Szedlecki was a Hollywood-film-loving fourteen-year-old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and she fled to the Soviet Union with her older brother, hoping to return for the rest of her family later. Instead, she ended up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union, enduring the harsh conditions of northern Siberia under Stalin's Communist regime. Szedlecki's beautifully written story, which lovingly reconstructs her pre-war childhood in Lodz, is also compelling for its candor about her experiences as a woman in the Soviet Union during World War II. As a very young woman without family, living largely by her wits, she was only too aware of her own vulnerability, and she met every challenge with a fierce determination to survive.
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A Drastic Turn of Destiny
by Fred Mann
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Under the Yellow & Red Stars is a remarkable story of survival, coming of age and homecoming after years as a stranger in a strange land. Alex Levin was only ten years old when he ran deep into the forest after the Germans invaded his hometown of Rokitno and only twelve when he emerged from hiding to find that he had neither parents nor a community to return to. A harrowing tale of escape, endurance and exceptional emotional resilience, Levin's story also draws us into his later life as an officer and eventual outcast in the USSR, and as an immigrant who successfully built a new life in Canada. This poetically written memoir is imbued with loss and pain, but also with the optimistic spirit of a boy determined to survive.
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Across the Rivers of Memory
by Felicia Carmelly
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Transnistria, Romania, did not exist on a map. Yet that is where ten-year-old Felicia Steigman and her parents arrived in 1941, after a cruel deportation and death march overseen by Romanian Nazi collaborators. After surviving three years amid squalor, devastation and death, they finally returned to their pre-war idyllic hometown, Vatra Dornei, only to find their suffering being silenced. Decades later, Felicia was determined to commemorate the forgotten cemetery of Transnistria in a way that could not be ignored.
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If Home is Not Here
by Max Bornstein
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Not quite two when he immigrated to Canada, Max Bornstein returned to Europe in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler came to power. Barely surviving as a stateless refugee in 1930s Paris, he escaped France when it fell to the Nazis only to be interned in a Spanish concentration camp.
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The Violin/A Child's Testimony
by Rachel Shtibel
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Rachel Milbauer, a vivacious and outgoing music lover, hid silently in an underground bunker in Nazi-occupied Poland for nearly two years. After the war, a recovered violin, case and photos hidden away by Rachel's beloved Uncle Velvel became cherished symbols of survival and continuity. Saved by inner fortitude, luck and the courage and caring of friends and strangers, Rachel and Adam met and fell in love, and set about building a new life together. Half a century later, a chance remark inspired Rachel to explore her memories. Always at her side, Adam chose to break his long self-imposed silence in the only way he could.
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The Shadows Behind Me
by Willie Sterner
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
For six desperate years, Willie Sterner's skill as a painter saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis. Faced with inhumane conditions in slave labour camps and grieving the loss of his close-knit family, Sterner relied on courage and ingenuity to hold onto his dignity. Through almost random luck, he came under the protection of the famed Oskar Schindler and became his personal art restorer. An unvarnished account of what he experienced and what he lost, The Shadows Behind Me, also follows the story of Willie and Eva — the woman he met on a death march — as they rebuilt their lives and regained hope in Canada. Gripping and moving, this is a tribute to one man's remarkable determination to survive.
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Joy Runs Deeper
by Bronia Beker
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Bronia and Josio (Joseph) grew up in Kozowa, a shtetl filled with lively culture, eccentric characters and extended family. When Bronia met Josio, she was charmed by his confidence and fearlessness. Separated when Josio was drafted into the army, reunited amid the chaos of war, their connection endured as their persecution intensified. When everything they held dear was lost, together they built a future.
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Alone in the Storm
by Leslie Vertes
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In 1944, twenty-year-old Leslie Vertes escapes from a forced labour detail in Budapest and miraculously survives by assuming a false identity. About to taste freedom as the end of the war nears, his liberation is short-lived when he is caught by the new Soviet regime and sent for two years of back-breaking labour and captivity. Years later, when he and his family flee to Canada, Leslie finally finds true freedom.
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Stronger Together
by Andy Réti
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In the fall of 1941, as the situation for Jews worsens across Europe, Ibolya (Ibi) Grossman learns she is pregnant. She is scared and confused — a baby during wartime? But her husband, Zolti, assures her, "We need this baby, you will see." When András (Andy) is born, Ibi realizes her husband was right. Andy gives her a reason to go on during the worst of times in the Budapest ghetto, and to persevere in their escape from Hungary after the war. In as much as Ibi's story is a tribute to her son, Andy's memoir, written through his own and his mother's memories, as well as her words and silences, is a tribute to her legacy.
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From Generation to Generation
by Agnes Tomasov
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Slovakia's Low Tatra Mountains in the fall of 1944, in constant danger from the Germans occupying nearby villages, fourteen-year-old Agnes Grossmann and her family made the daring decision to escape high into the mountains and hike along treacherous ice-covered peaks to safety. Twenty-four years later, Agnes Tomasov - then married with two children - found herself on the run from post-war Czechoslovakia's Communist regime and defected to Canada with her family, carrying only what they could fit in two suitcases.
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In Dreams Together
The Diary of Leslie Fazekas
by Leslie Fazekas
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Hungary, to Vienna, Austria, as forced laborers. Fate and fortune have intervened to save their lives, after the war, they discover that nearly half of their Jewish community was sent to Auschwitz. During the devastating circumstances of his captivity, Leslie records his experiences in a diary and in letters to his girlfriend, Judit, from whom he was separated in Vienna. For eight months, Leslie's words alternate between hope and uncertainty in love letters that are also a testimony of his survival during a perilous time. In Dreams Together features Leslie's diary alongside his postwar memoir, a reflection on his childhood, the war and the love that shaped his life.
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A Light in the Clouds
by Margalith Esterhuizen
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Margalith and her older sister, Dorica, grow up in a warm, close-knit family in Romania, but at a young age, the girls tragically lose their mother. Just as they are readjusting to a new family life, their childhood abruptly comes to a brutal end - Romania aligns itself with Nazi Germany and antisemitism boils over in their community. In 1941, Romanian soldiers force Margalith and her family from their home and send them on a devastating deportation march to the unknown. Crossing a river takes Margalith into Transnistria, a wretched land between borders, an expanse of thousands of kilometres containing more than a hundred ghettos and camps. This area, controlled by Romania, is where Jews like Margalith and her family are abandoned, left to die in desolation. A ghetto in the town of Murafa provides a bleak shelter where Margalith and her family struggle to keep starvation at bay until help arrives unexpectedly before war's end. Her journey to freedom and a new homeland provides both opportunity and heartache, and Margalith finds ‘A Light in the Clouds” as she endures the darkness of her past to search out the bright future ahead.
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Too Many Goodbyes: The Diaries of Susan Garfield
Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors from Hungary
by Susan Garfield
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In 1944, as Budapest's Jews begin to suffer under German occupation, eleven-year-old Zsuzsi (Susie) takes to her diary to write about her friends and family as she copes with what it means to be persecuted. Precocious and charming, Susie records the mundane along with the poignant as she describes her daily life in Budapest against the backdrop of the war. After the war, uncertain whether she made the right decision to emigrate, Susie writes all her feelings down in a new diary, the only place where she feels she truly belongs.
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Survival Kit
by Zuzana Sermer
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
An only child, fifteen-year-old Zuzana Sermer did what she could to protect her father and ailing mother when the Nazis set up a fascist regime in her native Slovakia in 1939. Four years later, after fleeing to the supposed safety of Budapest, Zuzana and her fiancé, Arthur, instead navigated one treacherous situation after another. Survival Kit is both Sermer's thoughtful reflections on the miracles of her survival and a testament to the power of courage, love and determination.
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In the Hour of Fate and Danger
by Ferenc Andai
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Ferenc Andai is one of approximately 6,000 Jewish Hungarian men conscripted to work as forced labourers in the copper mines of Bor, Serbia, between 1943 and 1944. Subject to the whims of cruel Hungarian commanders and German overseers, the men are forced to work to exhaustion while they subsist on a starvation diet. For nineteen-year old Ferenc, the only relief from his harsh reality is his company - an artistic and literary circle of men that includes the inspirational poet Miklós Radnóti.
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We Sang in Hushed Voices
by Helena Jockel
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
When the Nazis invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel thought only about how to save "her" children as she accompanied them all the way to Auschwitz. Her account of living and surviving in the camp is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the unremitting cruelty.
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Spring's End
by John Freund
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
A young boy who loved soccer as much as he loved to write, John Freund found his joyful childhood shattered by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. John's family suffered through the systematic erosion of their rights only to be deported to Theresienstadt — en route to the Auschwitz death camp.
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The Vale of Tears
by Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
An epic journey across borders, The Vale of Tears chronicles close to two years in the life of Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung as he seeks an escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe. In this rare, near day-by-day account, Rabbi Hirschprung illuminates what life was like for an Orthodox rabbi fleeing persecution, finding inspiration and hope in Jewish scripture and psalms as he navigates the darkness of wartime to a safe harbor in Kobe, Japan.
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Memories in Focus
by Pinchas Gutter
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Ten-year-old Pinchas is separated from his parents and twin sister when they are deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the killing site of Majdanek. As Pinchas is sent on to a series of concentration camps, he shuts himself off to the terrors surrounding him and tries his best not to be noticed, to become almost invisible. But after liberation, his photographic memory won't let his past fade away, and Pinchas struggles to deal with nightmares and flashbacks while raising a family and trying to heal his emotional scars. A poignant reflection on suffering, injustice and trauma, Memories in Focus also offers hope and faith in the future.
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A Part of Me
by Bronia Jablon
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Bronia Jablon is separated from her family, and even her husband has escaped into the woods without her. It is 1942, the height of Nazi persecution in Poland, and Bronia and her three-year-old daughter, Lucy, wonder how they will survive each day. Should they hide in their hometown or should they search for their family in the nearby ghetto? Starving and exhausted, Bronia does not know who they can trust when all of their old friends and neighbours are either collaborating with the Nazis or too terrified for their own lives to offer assistance. When they finally find help, a cold, dark cellar becomes both their haven and prison.
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The Weight of Freedom
by Nate Leipciger
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Nate Leipciger, a thoughtful, shy eleven-year-old boy, is plunged into an incomprehensible web of ghettos, concentration and death camps during the German occupation of Poland. As he struggles to survive, he forges a new, unbreakable bond with his father and yearns for a free future. But when he is finally liberated, the weight of his pain will not ease, and his memories remain etched in tragedy. Introspective, complicated and raw, The Weight of Freedom is Nate's journey through a past that he can never leave behind.
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Unsung Heroes
by Tibor Benyovits
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In 1944, after German forces invade Hungary, the Zionist youth organization that twelve-year-old Tibor belongs to goes underground to avoid detection. When Tibor is separated from his family, he must rely on the support of his network, a courageous group under immense pressure to save as many Jews as possible in Budapest. Inspired by these Unsung Heroes, Tibor joins the resistance effort and bravely acts as a courier for the group, delivering false identity documents and protective papers to Jews in danger. When the war ends and Tibor must face all that he has lost, his group remains his lifeline, giving him hope and helping him find freedom.
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Getting Out Alive
by Tommy Dick
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Nineteen-year-old Tommy Dick was killed, only to resurface. Born into a Hungarian family who had converted from Judaism, Tommy soon found out that in the eyes of the Nazis, he was still a Jew, still a target for murder. On the run and in disguise, Tommy was chased by death as much as he was by luck. Getting Out Alive is a vivid and gripping account of how the courageous acts of others, unshakeable friendships, and Tommy's own extraordinary quick wit conspired to save the life of this adventurous and determined young man in the cruelest of times.
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Buried Words
The Diary of Molly Applebaum
by Molly Applebaum
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Hidden away underground, in a box, twelve-year-old Molly has only her older cousin and her diary to keep her company. For two years, she writes of her confinement "in a grave": the cold, dark and stuffiness, the unbearable suffering from insufficient food, and the complicated reliance on the two farmers who are risking their own lives to save her. Buried Words is a stark confession of Molly's fears, despair and secrets and, above all, her fervent wish to stay alive.
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If Only It Were Fiction
by Elsa Thon
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Elsa Thon was a sixteen-year-old photographer's apprentice when the Nazis occupied her town of Pruszków, Poland. When her family was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, Elsa joined a community farm and was recruited by the Underground. Despite her deep belief in destiny, Elsa refused to bow to her fate as a Jew in war-torn Poland.
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Before All Memory Is Lost
Women's Voices from the Holocaust
by Various Authors
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In this first Azrieli Foundation anthology, twenty-five women reflect on their experiences of survival — from the heart-stopping fears of hiding to the extreme risks of "passing" as non-Jews, and from the terrors of the Nazi camps to the treacheries of the Soviet Union. This powerful collection, woven together by the common thread of resistance, features a wide variety of narrative styles, including prose, poetry and diary excerpts.
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A Promise of Sweet Tea
by Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In A Promise of Sweet Tea, a Jewish community comes alive in this vividly told story of a childhood interrupted by the Holocaust. In his wry and evocative prose, Pinchas Blitt conjures Kortelisy - a humble, vibrant village in the backwoods of western Ukraine. Young Pinchas lives in fear of Cossacks and wolves and the local antisemitic children, but he finds belonging in the rich texts and traditions of his ancestors. When the Soviets invade, Pinchas's life is infused with new meaning as he innocently devotes himself to the teachings of Comrade Stalin. Then the Nazis arrive, and Pinchas witnesses his beloved village being brutally attacked. As his family seeks safety in the marshes and forests, their precarious existence brings Pinchas face to face with his own mortality and faith, and with a sense of dislocation that will accompany him throughout his life.
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Daring to Hope
by Rachel Lisogurski
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
When Rachel and her husband, Avrumeh, escape from the Siemiatycze ghetto in Poland one cold winter night in 1942 with their four-year-old daughter, Chana, they are desperate for refuge. Turned away by their closest friends, they are forced to wander the countryside looking for places to hide and asking for help from strangers and acquaintances. For close to two years, every day is filled with uncertainty for them and for the courageous farmers who eventually hide them. Throughout, young Chana is fiercely protected by her parents, who teach her not to cry, not to even make a sound. After liberation, Chana's childhood truly begins, and decades later, she finally has the opportunity to honour those who rescued her family. Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, Daring to Hope reflects on the darkness of wartime and the love that held a family together.
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A Childhood Adrift
by René Goldman
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
René Goldman grows up entranced with the theatre, music, languages and geography. Enveloped by his parents' love and protection, he wanders the streets of Luxembourg and then Brussels, carefree and prone to mischief. But in 1942, his family flees to France and eight-year-old René is separated from his parents and shunted between children's homes and convents, where he must hide both his Jewish identity and his mounting anxiety. As René waits for his parents to return, even liberation day does not feel like freedom.
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At Great Risk
Memoirs of Rescue during the Holocaust
by Eva Lang
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In France, underground networks find refuge for eleven-year-old Eva Lang and her younger sisters, protecting them from internment camps. In an orphanage in Slovakia, a pastor shelters young David Korn and his older brother, saving them from deportation. In a village in Poland, a farmer hides nine-year-old Fishel Philip Goldig and his parents after they escape from a ghetto and certain death. When so many people stood by during the anti-Jewish atrocities of the Holocaust, others risked their lives to save their Jewish friends and neighbours, and often even strangers. The three feature memoirs in At Great Risk are accompanied by excerpted stories of rescue by thirteen previously published Azrieli Foundation authors, highlighting the diverse experiences of rescue during the Holocaust. Together, these stories emphasize not only the courage and moral strength of the rescuers but also the survivors' remembrances of and gratitude to their rescuers after the war.
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Escape from the Edge
by Morris Schnitzer
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Narrow escapes and bold decisions define the life of teenager Morris Schnitzer. Fleeing from Nazi Germany before the onset of World War ii, Morris ends up in the Netherlands only to watch the country be invaded by the Nazis. With his father's warning to never set foot in a concentration camp echoing in his mind, Morris resolves to fight - and survive. As he assumes false identities and crosses endless borders in search of safety, Morris never acquiesces to the Nazi occupiers in Western Europe. In his epic journey to Escape from the Edge, Morris endures imprisonment and grueling work as a farmhand, joins the resistance in Belgium and ultimately enlists in the American army, vowing to take revenge for all that he has lost.
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A Cry in Unison
by Judy Cohen
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In Debrecen, Hungary, Judy grows up in a warm and lively family, but when the Nazis invade in 1944, she is crowded into a ghetto, her life now shaped by fear and hopelessness. When the cattle cars take Judy and her family to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she truly leaves her precious childhood behind as she scrambles to survive in the shadow of the gas chambers, one brutal day at a time. Judy survives by clinging to her sisters, to friends, and to fleeting life-affirming moments, and once she creates a new life for herself in Canada, she makes it her mission to give a voice both to women who were murdered in the Holocaust and to those who survived.
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A Tapestry of Survival
by Leslie Mezei
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Twelve-year-old Leslie Mezei, a lively, curious boy, doesn't realize how precarious his life is as a Jew in German-occupied Hungary in 1944. His older sister Magda, aware of the growing danger from Nazis and Hungarian fascists, takes charge and bravely tries to direct the family's survival, while his sister Klari, tough and determined, faces a brutal ordeal of her own. Confronting deportation, concentration camps and the constant threat of capture, the Mezei siblings carefully navigate the treacherous landscape of wartime Hungary. After the war, the family reunites briefly before setting out in different directions to start new lives, and in Montreal, Leslie meets his wife, Annie, who has a survival story of her own. In A Tapestry of Survival the voices of Leslie, Magda, Klari and Annie are woven together to reveal a larger tale of courage, resilience and the search for healing.
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E96: Fate Undecided
by Paul-Henri Rips
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
The son of an Antwerp diamond merchant, Paul-Henri Rips was ten when the Nazis invaded Belgium and ended his "golden childhood" forever. Guided by his father's admonition to "Sei a mensch" (Be a decent person), Rips managed to hold onto his humanity in the face of unfathomable inhumanity.
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As the Lilacs Bloomed
by Anna Molnár Hegedűs
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and as she wrote, she waited, desperately hoping her family would return.
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Under the Yellow & Red Stars
by Alex Levin
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Under the Yellow & Red Stars is a remarkable story of survival, coming of age and homecoming after years as a stranger in a strange land. Alex Levin was only ten years old when he ran deep into the forest after the Germans invaded his hometown of Rokitno and only twelve when he emerged from hiding to find that he had neither parents nor a community to return to. A harrowing tale of escape, endurance and exceptional emotional resilience, Levin's story also draws us into his later life as an officer and eventual outcast in the USSR, and as an immigrant who successfully built a new life in Canada. This poetically written memoir is imbued with loss and pain, but also with the optimistic spirit of a boy determined to survive.
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Memories from the Abyss/But I Had a Happy Childhood
by William Tannenzapf
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
William Tannenzapf never wavered in his determination to survive and save his wife and baby girl from the evil that gripped his home town of Stanislawów. Blond, cherubic, Renate Krakauer was a "miracle baby" born as the world descended into war and soon surrounded by misery and death. Starved and enslaved, Tannenzapf entrusted his daughter to a Polish family so that little Renate could live in "childhood oblivion" — yet still under the eyes of her loving parents. Later reunited and thrown into the trials of refugee and immigrant life, Krakauer's thoughtful observations provide fascinating insight into the perceptions of a child survivor and offer a poignant counterpoint to Tannenzapf's adult reflections on the same events. This gripping volume offers the reader the rare opportunity to read survival stories from two members of the same family.
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Bits and Pieces
by Henia Reinhartz
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Lodz, Poland, 1944. Teenaged Henia Rosenfarb sat with her family in a small, secret room, hiding from Nazi soldiers who were looking for them. Little could the fiery redhead have imagined that her path would take her from wartime Poland to faraway Canada.
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Dignity Endures
by Judith Rubinstein
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
When the train from Hungary to Auschwitz brings Judith face-to-face with death, her mother's quick actions save her. At twenty-four years old, separated from her family, she struggles to stay alive in a system bent on humiliation and degradation, where surviving the daily violence is a matter of luck. Judith endures the destruction of her family, holding close the memories of those she loved. Feeling hopelessly alone after the war, she must figure out how to put her life back together and where to find home. Weaving together her story with those of cherished friends and family, Judith's poetic reminiscences show how Dignity Endures even through the worst of human tragedies.
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Behind the Red Curtain
by May Rakitova
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Swept up in the Bolshevik revolution, Joseph Stalin's Communist Party purges and World War II, the Rakitova family faces innumerable obstacles to survival. But young Maya knows only that her father is gone and that she must hide her Jewish identity. With what Maya calls "uncommon courage," her mother fights to protect her, relying on the tenuous hope that Maya can keep her identity a secret.
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The Hidden Package
by Claire Baum
Part of the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs series
Almost forty years after the end of the end of the war, Claire Baum opens a package from a stranger in Rotterdam, unleashing a flood of repressed memories from her childhood. As Claire delves into her past, she uncovers the personal sacrifice and bravery of her parents, the Dutch resistance and the families that selflessly gave shelter to her and her sister, Ollie.