Germany Books

It's my first time to really get into the picture of the holocaust as almost living the story by reading it, The story is more then amazing and get the reader into the actual world as lived by the author at that time.
As much amazing the Nazie's viciousness you will be amazed by the young boy (the author) bravery against all chances.
More then getting an historical event as seen by a movie about the holocaust, ANY ONE WILL LEARN from that story about the life we are living and more ..

It has been a long time since I have read a book that had me so "hooked". It has all the elements of an engrossing story... and to boot, it's all true. What an inspiration, delivered in clear, concise writing. It's surprising that it has never been made into a movie. Very highly recommended for all ages. Thank you for sharing it all, Mr. Eisner.

The facts as they should be told as part of a beautiful love story. Eisner had a deep love of his people, his family, his Helina and most importantly of his life. This is a compelling story and a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust.

This incredible piece of writing is a materpiece! I was engrossed in The Survivor from the first page and was deeply moved throughout. Jack Eisner's incredible true story of survival against all odds in the face of unimaginable human cruelty and brutality by the Nazis, should be compulsory reading for teenage secondary students!!

Hello there, I'm not a big reader, but when I found your book at the library, it was too good and for the first time, I read it twice! I don't know how anybody could have make it through these circumstances. I recommanded it to my sister and she read it also. I always recommand it to all the poeple I know. This person is extraordinary! I'm still looking for a place where I could buy it.

Joel Agee's Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany offers a hilarious and universal account of the passage from boyhood to manhood. Enjoying this book does not require an interest in its unique setting. Never mind that the entire work occurs between 1948 and 1960 in the Stalinist dictatorship of the German (un)Democratic Republic; or that the author's Jewish American mother is living with her children and second husband in the anti-fascist Soviet Satellite of the only recently vanquished Third Reich; or that the author's biological father is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, James Agee; or that his stepfather is an East German writer whose socialist themes become less relevant the more the dictatorship he lives in takes hold. Joel Agee so powerfully conveys the challenging and exciting passage of a male from age eight to twenty, that distinctions of place, time, name, and circumstance meld into a broader truth.

By page thirteen, the book's ever more ironic and outrageously funny form takes shape -- the fibs to Mom, friendship mischief, the struggle to fit in with peer groups, and the stirrings of sexual awakening that should have long ago made this work a classic.

I too have been urged by friends to write a book about my youth. In 1981, at the age of 18, I decided to reunite with my father and immigrated from the USA to the DDR. I was later expelled in 1986 for political reasons and lived elsewhere in Europe until my return in 1991 following the Fall of The Berlin Wall. I remained there until April of 2000 at which time I returned to the USA.
This book brought back some memories despite the difference in time. (The Author went to the DDR in 1948 at the age of 8. I went to the DDR in 1981 at the age of 18) I had no idea that there had been any other Americans that shared an even remotely similar story and Joel Agee does a great job of telling his story with far more emotion and prose than I ever could.
The book is a wonderful insight into life in a country that no longer exists...from the view point of an American child/young adult. I especially recommend it to anyone who has grown-up or lived in a country where they felt they did not belong. In my opinion, Agee entered the DDR in its infancy and left just as its darkest period began. I entered The DDR at the height of the Reagan Era and witnessed its collapse from within. Two historic phases. I only wish that both of us could have witnessed more.

I read Joel Agee's book "Twelve Years. An American Boyhood in East Germany" in German and in English and tried very hard to get a used copy of his first american edition - without any success. Finally, he is back again with a new edition, and allthough my english is not as good as it should be, I just want to write down some words abaout this book. For me who always lived in Western Germany it is one of the most interesting books about the communist part of Germany, the GDR (in german it's DDR). It was not meant to be a political book, but it has become one anyhow. The reader is not only enabled to follow a very private story of growing up as a boy (including all the problems most man - since they have been boys - know and prefer not to talk about it), but to understand how culture and everyday life had been transformed by the communist ideology in a way that could be critizised only by children: some simply laughed about it and learned, that even only to laugh could have negative consequences. And getting some idea of how adults did discuss the political penetration of everyday life makes you feel glad to be grown up in a non communist state - but still you can understand that this adults they had their living like others had, and that they were fathers and mothers having everyday problems like others had. This book indeed touched and pleased me. It is a marvellous written autobiographical kind of literature. If you'll read it, it will take a part of your heart and your intellect to. You'll have to love it.

I'm delighted to see that Joel Agee's memoir is now available again, and I look forward, with pleasure, to re-reading it. In beautiful prose, Agee not only reveals the pains and pleasures of his growing up (it could be anywhere), but gives us a portrait, from an unusual angle, of life in the newly formed German Democratic Republic, i.e.,communist East Germany, during the period 1948-1960. The historian will find the book of particular interest, but so will anyone else who enjoys entering the unsual world of a sensitive young man with a terrific eye for detail, and who is frank about his inner life.

Agee returned to the U.S. just as the amazing 60s were about to roll their thunder, and I can't wait to read his follow-up memoir, his "American Manhood" in another world far removed from the East Berlin of his youth.

"Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany" is a fascinating memoir. Eight-year-old Joel Agee was brought by his mother and stepfather to the Soviet zone of Germany (what would become East Germany) in 1948 and lived there for the next 12 years. As Agee's stepfather, Bodo Uhse, was a prominent Communist, Agee had the best that East Germany could offer: a villa with servants, summers at the Baltic Sea, and numerous opportunities to recover from his dismal performance at school. Agee does provide an insight as to how the Communist intelligentsia in that country thought -- their explanations for the closed border, their view of the Stalinist (and Soviet-bloc) purges in the early 50s, and their conflicting views of Khruschev's revelations. This memoir is also a coming-of-age story, filled with teenage angst and sexual frustration. What distinguishes this from many other memoirs is that it is exceptionally well-written. Although Agee was never able to get his bearings in the East German school system (or was, as we would say today, a "slacker") his descriptions are almost poetic. Well worth reading.

This is a non fiction book by Joseph Roth whose other books are mainly fiction - he was a prized journalist and writes like the best of both worlds - this book is an extraordinary picture of a period of life which we don't know enough about - because WW II got in the way and rendered information about Jews and life in Germany and eastern Europe in the 20's and 30's sort of academic and moot - It is an important and compelling and sad book - sad because we readers know facts that the author doesn't - we know what happened and he doesn't know the future. It is a valuable book which I have recommended and given to many friends.

"The Wandering Jews" of the title are the displaced and unwanted Jews of Eastern Europe (from where Roth himself came before he made himself into one of Western Europe's foremost journalists and writers) before World War II. As Roth puts it, "Eastern Jews have no home anywhere, but their graves may be found in every cemetery." And as Roth foreshadowed (that line originally was published in 1925; this translation also includes the preface and an afterword to the later 1937 edition), the plight of the Eastern Jews only promised to become more dire. Indeed, one senses that Roth despaired that any strident alarm would be in vain. Thus, more than an alarm, THE WANDERING JEWS is a requiem. (And Roth went on to drink himself to death in 1939.)

In the first part of the book, Roth sets out to limn the character and essence of the Eastern Jew. I am willing to believe that he is thoroughly successful. (Example: "None of the many untrue and unjust accusations that are brought against Eastern Jews by the West are as untrue and unjust as the accusation that they are what the gutter press likes to call Bolshevik. Of all the world's poor, the poor Jew is surely the most conservative.")

In the second part of the book, Roth provides snapshots of five different aggregations of the Eastern Jews -- in the ghettoes of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, in America (where there are "people who are more Jewish than the Jews, which is to say the Negroes"), and in Soviet Russia. As for the future of the Jews in Russia, Roth was somewhat optimistic in 1925, but by 1937 that optimism had been dispelled altogether. (Roth thus proved himself more cold-bloodedly realistic than many contemporary European liberals.)

Joseph Roth was a superb writer and a masterful polemicist. (I recently read a collection of H.L. Mencken's journalism, this particular one "A Religious Orgy in Tennessee", dealing with the Scopes Monkey Trial, and while there are obvious similarities between Roth and Mencken, who were contemporaries, Roth was by far the better and more cultured writer.) Here, the sardonic and sarcastic tone, albeit understandable, is at times wearing, but it is readily tolerated and forgiven by virtue of the sheer acuity of Roth's intellect and insights and by his compassion.

Roth is extremely prescient, not only about communism and Soviet Russia and about the Nazis and the Holocaust ("Centuries of civilization are no guarantee that a European people, by some ghastly curse of fate, will not revert to barbarism."), but also, startlingly so, about the Zionist/Palestinian dilemma. With regard to that last conundrum, I will let Roth, once again, speak for himself:

"Zionism and nationhood are by their nature Western European ideals * * *. Only in the East do people live who are unconcerned with their "nationality", in the Western European sense. They speak several languages, are themselves the product of several generations of mixed marriages, and fatherland for them is whichever country happens to conscript them. * * * Natiionality is a Western concept."

"The young halutzim [Zionist Jews who seek to establish a Jewish presence in Palestine] are brave farmers and workers, and they demonstrate the willingness of the Jew to work and till the fields and become sons of the soil, in spite of having spent hundreds of years among books. Unfortunately the halutzim are also oblighed to take up arms, to be soldiers, and to protect the land against the Arabs. Thus the European example has been carried into Palestine. * * * The Jew has a right to Palestine, not because he once came from there but because no other country will have him. The Arab's fear for his freedom is just as easy to understand as the Jew's genuine intention to play fair by his neighbor. And despite all that, the immigration of young Jews into Palestine increasingly suggests a kind of Jewish Crusade, because, unfortunately, they also shoot."

This is a remarkable and brilliant portrait of a marginal and now tragically vanished people by a remarkable and brilliant person.

Joseph Roth's "The Wandering Jews" is one of the best written and most important books about East European Jews ever published. At a time of growing anti-Semitism (the first edition was written in 1926 and an update was published in Paris in 1937) and an immigration crisis affecting Germany as countless refugees poured into Berlin from the East, Roth--himself a Jew from Galicia, the easternmost part of the former Austrian empire--creates a sympathetic yet clearsighted portrait of contemporary Jewish life. In the process he effectively responds to all the stereotypes and libels heaped on East European Jews. For the contemporary reader, however, what is most affecting about this portrait is Roth's ability to convey a panorama of Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Though no one (except maybe Hitler) could have predicted, even in 1937, the extent of the devastation that would be visited on European Jewry, Roth's writing in this book serves as an indelible and moving memorial to a civilization that would soon disappear forever. It must therefore count among the first books in what would now be called "Holocaust literature," and one of the most meaningful works of protest literature--protest against the stereotypes that reduced Jews to objects of scorn and contempt; protest against the violence that would ensue from these stereotypes--of all time. Michael Hofmann's understated and articulate translation of this poignant, heartbreaking little book is a tremendous service for English-language readers. It fills in a vital space in the emerging image of Joesph Roth, a writer finally receiving his due in the precincts of European modernism, and it should be read by everyone interested in good writing and the problems of 20th century history.

Again and again--with one neat phrase--Roth puts anxieties into words that it took others whole books to communicate, and then, only vaguely. Not even the magnificent Kafka comes close to a tidy phrase of self-condemnation such as this, referring to the deracinated Western Jew, with his "secret perversities, his cringing before the law, his well-bred hat held in his anxious hand". This statement took my breath away. So did many others in this short book throbbing with love, fear, and sadness. Roth was himself a Jew, one of the thousands who had served his "adopted 'country' " in the Great War (as so many other Jews did for so many other countries) only to have reality--eternal victimhood, eternal wandering--thrust him away, from Vienna, to Berlin, and then to Paris. Like so many educated Western Jews, he looked back to the shtetl with admiration for its nurturing of an authentic self (coupled with a faint relief at not having to live there). This tension--and its guilt-feelings--are so tidily explained in Roth, and his predictions made in the 1930's so chilling--that I jumped almost with relief on his touting the Soviet Union as a better place for Jews. Ah...but an afterward to the second edition contains Roth's warning that things in the USSR have changed, and perhaps his enthusiasm was misplaced...

Then, reader, I cried uncle. Joseph Roth was perfect. Anger and love mix with poetry and humility. He neither rolls in the mud of guilt, nor clutches an ideology through all contrary evidence. Instead, he sings Kaddish for a people gone, a people authentic and pure and of, as Kafka said, "the prayer shawl, now flying away from us..."

This book was a paen by a 'civilized (read westernized)' Jew on the cusp of WW2 and the holocaust. Roth travelled in most of post-WW1 Eastern Europe to learn the plight of his Jewish compatriots. In the original edition (written in 1926) he speaks of Eastern European Jews (mostly those of Galicia and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) being able to find freedom of conscience and a world without anti-semitism by moving to the West. Unfortunately, by the West he meant Germany.

In the epilogue of the 1937 edition (which he wrote from self-exile in Paris) he takes the "New Germany" to task for the treatment of the Jews. He make major points as to the failure of the League of Nations to protect the Versailles Treaty 'national minorities' and specifically the treatment of DPs (displaced persons, people literally without a country). He makes the point that animals are protected in most countries better than Jews and DPs.

He is prescient when he speaks of an 'impending disaster' and seems to presage 'donor burnout'. He tells how right after a calamity, everyone seems to want to pitch in, but after awhile, except for a few philantropists, everyone pretty much wants to go back to their own lives.
This book is among the strongest statements made prior to WW2 of the approaching calamity, not just for Jews but all of Europe.

Warplanes of the Third Reich is simply the best book on the subject, hands down. The amount of research done on each aircraft is daunting, to say the least. I can't recommend this book enough.

-Ski

Books on this topic do not get any better!

This book has everything! I wish all aviation history books covered the topic so completely. you'll never need another book on the topic.

Originally published by New Impression in 1972, William Green has produced the ultimate guide for researchers who study the facts and details behind the ultimate failure of the Luftwaffe to win World War Two!
With all due respects to the History and Discovery Channels, Bill Green puts the lie to the History Channel's program asserting that the Messerchmitt ME 264 was going to be used to drop a radiological WMD on New York in late 1944. In fact it was 5 Heinkel He 177A-7's that were going to drop NERVE GAS on New York in a suicidal attack. This was later cancelled when General Patton's 3rd Army was about to over run the German air base at Bordeaux-Me'rignac!
As for the frequently mentioned theory that Hitler's insistance that Me 262 jet fighters be used as bombers was the reason that the Germans quickly lost the airwar over Europe, Green dumps that allegation into the toliet on Page 7 of this book in the Preface. The jet engines the Germans were using had a life of ten hours before they had to be completely overhauled! A fact that escapes most of the cable channel TV shows!
One facinating story from the book is the fact that a six engined Junkers Ju 390 V3 bomber in January 1944 flew from Mont de Marsan France to within 12 miles of the New York coast and returned to France in a non-stop flight of 31 hours! This aircraft weighed in at 166,450 lbs, fully loaded.
If you love technical details combined with a amusing view of the characters involved in the German Aircraft industry in WW-II, you will love this book.

This book offers very detailed information related to the design and development of the many warplanes of Hitler's Germany. Green presents a good selection of photos of the aircraft with quite a few cutaway drawings and 3-views for almost all. This is a great resource for modelers.

This was a book that changed my life. It's fast and spell binding reading. An amazing drama that's only too real.

This is one of the most important books written on the Shoah.
To reply to the reviewer who wanted to know what America could have done I dont know maybe excepted boats of Jews when they tried to come to America instead of refusing to and sending them back to their eventual slaughter. Thats just one of many.

I had read suggestions over the years that the Roosevelt (FDR) Administration had a weak and obstructionist policy towards the plight of the Jews in Europe in the years leading up to WWII. Unfortunately, I let this book sit on the bookshelf for nearly twenty years before I got around to reading it. I was appalled at the extent of US governmental indifference and interference! One of the major problems facing the Jews who could sense the imminent danger in Germany was that of finding some place to move to. Most of the Western world did not want to accept them as refugees and especially in the numbers that were materializing. As the grandson of an immigrant, I had written a term paper on the US immigration policy with apparrent pride when I was in junior high school. I understood the various quota systems that favored North Western Europeans and heavily discriminated against those of other races. I had understood the reasons that it took two of my grandfather's brothers so long to immigrate here. I understood why many immigrants went to Canada instead (including the fact that Canada is a fine country). I had understood the laws requiring that persons coming to this country needed to provide proof that they would be able to provide for their own support once they got here. However, Arthur Morse gave examples after examples of how all of the existing immigration laws were twisted, tightened and squeezed to keep the Jewish refugees from finding a new home here. We were just another country that left them to fend helplessly for themselves in Nazi Germany. "While Six Million Died" is a difficult book to read for an American. It is a reminder of the anti-semitism that generations after the Holocaust find hard to understand. At best Americans can say that their government's behavior at the time wasn't any worse than that of other governments. The shame is that it wasn't any better either. America has faced its' disgrace over its' past racism and the scandal of the Japanese internment camps. However, I have not noticed much ado about the issues that Morse raises in "While Six Million Died". That is why this is such an important book to read.

This volume tells of how the USA and Britain during World War II, were not only apathetic to the fate of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but actually obstructed all efforts to save them.
The book explores the questions:
What did the rest of the world, in particular the United States and Great Britain, know about the Nazi plans for the annihilation of the Jews?
What was their reaction to this knowledge?
After it was learned from a German industrialist, and relayed by the representative in Switzerland of the World Jewish Congress, Gerhardt Riegner, of the plans by the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry (and after well over a million Jewish men, women and children had already been butchered , Czech exile Ernest Frischer urged the Allies urged the Allies to ease the blockade of Nazi-occupied Europe so that relief supplies could reach occupied Europe, and proposed that the International Red Cross supply food parcels to ghettos and concentration camps as it did prisoner of war camps. He asked that Jewish children be evacuated from German-occupied territories.
It was debated but no action in this regard was taken.

By January 1943, new evidence had come to light about Nazi mass murder. Riegner provided the American State Department a detrailed 4 page description of Nazi atrocities.
It was reported that the Nazis were killing six thousand Jews each day in Poland.
A 'Stop Hitler Now' Rally was organized by Rabbi Stephen Wise at Madison Square Gardens on March 1, 1943.Chaim Weizmann, President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine stated that "The world can no longer plead that the ghastly facts are unknown and uncomfirmed. At this moment expressions of sympathy without accompanying attempts to launch acts become a hollow mockery in the ears of the dying. The democracies have a clear duty before them. Let them negotiate with Germany through the neutral countries concerning the possible release of the Jews in the occupied countries. Let havens be designated in the vast territories of the United Nations which will give sanctuary to those fleeing from imminent murder. Let the gates of Palestine be opened...the Jewish community of Palestine will welcome with joy and and thanksgiving all delivered from Nazi hands".
Due to violent Arab opposition to Jews entering Palestine, the British closed the gates of the Palestine Mandate and turned back thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler back to the Nazi ovens.
The British announced that there would be no Jewish immigration into the ancient Jewish homeland "unless the Arabs are prepared to acquiesce in it.". They were not, and so millions of Jews who could have been saved died.

The British also rejected the idea of a Jewish parachute unit from Palestine to rescue Jews in Europe, as they were afraid this would advance Jewish Nationhood in the Land of Israel.
The USA refused entry to many Jewish refugees, including a consignment of ten thousand Jewish children, because of domestic objection to Jewish immigration. There was no objection however to the refuge in the USA of thousands of British children, from the German blitz of Britain.

Australia, with it's vast unsettled spaces, announced at the Evian Conference of 1938, that 'As we have no real racial problem we are not desirous of importing one."
Refuges were suggested in such places as the Dominican Republic, Mindanao, British Guiana, the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and Angola.
It all came to nothing.
The proposal, by Dr Weizmann, for the Allies to bombing the gas chambers and furnaces in the death camps was rejected after it was opposed by the Soviets.
And a deal offered by Eichmann to exchange hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives for ten thousand trucks was also rejected.
The Ghetto Fighters House, a kibbutz in Israel founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto published the Vittel Diary by Itzhak Katznelson whose recurring theme was apathy in the face of Nazi murder:
"Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they they warn the murderers, never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations were afraid the killings might stop."
The Allied powers could have saved millions of Jews and chose not to.
Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union bare some responsibility for the Holocaust.
The Jews realized that only their own state and army could save Jewish lives, and citizens of countries that did not lift a finger to save Jewish lives have no right to condemn Israel in any way for saving her children against those who would murder them.

I have written my review in the form of a poem.I dedicate this poem to Arthur D. Morse:

I am Liberty. I am Columbia. I am the Mother of Exiles!

Never again will my head be bowed down in tears, My torch held low and dim. Shame on you Franklin Roosevelt for the Bloody stain on my gown, which shall Never wash off.

I am the Mother of Exiles! Suffer my children unto me and I will protect thee. Woe be unto those who commit murder and mayhem upon thee! For I will step down from my pedestal, Not with books in my hand but with a flaming sword, And my shining torch. And lead my children to freedom and safety!

Heed my words, those who choose to destroy freedom. For I am Liberty. I am Columbia. I am America!

WITNESSES OF WAR: CHILDREN'S LIVES UNDER THE NAZIS is a riveting, involving survey which uses original material from children's schoolwork, diaries, letters from evacuation camps and more to recreate the child perception and experience during the war. Many of these children had to take over when parents couldn't: their stories provide a different perspective on the effects of life under the Nazis, and should be added to the chronicles of any serious Holocaust representation.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This book was one of many I have read about Nazi inhumanity. The difference is that this one was centered on children. I was so astonished to read about the cruel and inhumane way the Nazis treated their own children that did not "conform" to the current political climate. My question, after reading this book is, are the traits that the German people seem to have had during the Nazi period part of the human condition, or part of Europe, or part of the first part of the 20th century, or what?? Is it in all of us to act and react as the people described in this book? This book is a MUST READ for anyone trying to understand the authoritarian, parochial and nationalistic actions of the Nazis and all Germans during the third reich.

Mr. Stargardt brilliantly explores how Nazi rule affected the lives of children of all nationalities in wartime Europe during WWII. Through extensive research, the author shows how children thought and acted when faced with horrific experiences. Great historical writing and not a dull paragraph therein.

As has become more recently of common knowledge, thousands of minor German Jews left Germany to spend the war, and in many cases the rest of their lives, in Great Britain and elsewhere with foster families, and at times, in group homes. This was the subject of an award-winning documentary recently.

The other side of this story--the story of German and other youths and the course of the war on their developemnt and life histories has almost been a subject of PC silence, lest the "suffering" of Germans or children of Nazis be considered with versimilitude. This book proves these issues must be discussed and considered--they affect geopolitics today as much as they did in the 1930s and 1940s until the German reunification.

Some of the issues invovled--protecting young Germans from the young "criminal element"--those youngsters being the seeds of the Third Reich post-war. Also important became protecting children during the RAF by night and USAAF by day bombing of German cities. As H. Goering said early in the war, should Berline be bombed, "you can call me Meier." Well, by 1940, some people were doing just so--quietly.

Nicholas Stargardt uses his excellent understanding of German to bring as a truly deep and unique perspective into the young lives of children in the Reich, reminding us that FORTY PERCENT of men born in German in 1920 were dead by 1945. This is even more astounding than the currently fashionable debate about the incendiary bombing and casualties at Dresden.

I believe it is long overdue that the effects of the war on Germans as well as the millions of Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roman, criminals, and enemies of the state be considered worthy of scholarly study. I also feel this book has set a standard to meet--including some of the most revealing photographs of childrens' art and children DOING art that I have yet seen. A masterpiece of scholarship!

This is an excellent study of the affect World War II had on children, both German and their oppressed contemporaries in other countries. It's certainly most poignant when discussing the Jewish children, who were the ones who bore the brunt of the evils of the Nazi regime. There were also the so-called "sub-humans" (to the Nazis), the children of Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia and others, whose fate, in some instances, was as terrible as the Jews. It's a very sad book, but an important one for us to realize that war has a most profound affect on the youngest of us, who have no say in what occurrs around them, or in what happens to them. What impressed me the most was the feeling of "victimhood" that the German people, young and old, adopted after the War. They knew, in many cases, that the Jews were being exterminated, but it didn't appear to bother them until the war, in all its horror, reached them where they lived. I grieve for the bad things that happened to the children of both sides, but assuming the mantle of victim by the Germans really is pushing sympathy to the breaking point. I won't say that I feel that they deserved what happened to them, what intelligent person would, but there is "war guilt" that was ignored right after the war, and only in the late 60s did the country as a whole own up to its responsibility. Better late than never, I suppose.

I was attracted to Portraits of Our Past in order to expand my knowledge on the true history of the founder of my company, Berlitz. However, half way through the first chapter I had forgotten all about my first motives as I found myself totally absorbed into a world where oppression and second rate citizenship were unable to dampen down the spirituality and ingenuity of German Jews. Portraits of Our Past contains a detailed look at the everyday lives of the writer's own family and friends dating back over the last 3 centuries. A must read for anyone with an interest in history, community, ingenuity, business and spirituality.

This is a moving book! After I turned the first page, I could not put it down until late at night. Beginning with two oil portraits, I journeyed into the past, walked through small Germall villages of centuries ago, and I lived within a rich tapestry of lives and events.

Regardless of personal religion, Christian (this reader), Jew, Muslim or any other faith, this book carries the reader into the common cultural past and heritage of family we all share. The attention to detail is meticulous, but this book is more than a historical dramatization. Reading it is to experience German village life with its wedddings, joys, fears, hopes and excitement. We look forward to a sequel by Ms. Rose which will bring us forward and closer to our own time.

Through first-hand research in the archives of 18th and 19th century Wurttemberg, Germany, Emily Rose has produced an engaging journal of lives of some real Jewish families in the environs of the Black Forest. The lives she traces from the early 1700's in southern Germany to Davenport, Iowa and the near-north-side of Chicago are those of some of her ancestors, a fact that she uses to great advantage by correlating detailed familial knowledge with objective data from government records and publications of the times. The stories are embellished with over 75 unusual illustrations. The 200 year transition of the Jews in the book from despised beggars and peddlers to established merchants and professionals is told in an authoritative voice, supported with statistical data. There are several instances of Jewish leaders gaining a good measure of esteem in the Christian community, despite a generally hostile public. The author describes the formation of Jewish community organizations, sanctioned by the Wurttemberg government, to cope with medieval anti-Semitic feelings extant in the countryside. In this connection, there emerge several accounts of strong disputes between a central Wurttemberg government that seeks to reduce the restrictions on Jews, against various local governments that oppose such relaxation, acting out of anti-Semitism and commercial competitiveness. As the Jews are permitted to progress from peddlers to more acceptable occupations, and as they begin to assimilate into the larger community, one can see the beginnings of Reform Judaism take form in the Wurttemberg countryside. Good biographies and fascinating history.

This is a wonderful, warm, caring book about life and family and problems in the old country and about coming to America to start life anew. The author was inspired to write the book by the two old portraits of ancestors that hung in her childhood home. For five years she researched in the U.S. and Europe about her own ancestors and about the social, political, economic and religious forces that affected them. What she produced is a marvelous book that uses her own ancestors as a sort of everyman to take the reader through the experiences of daily life, social and political struggles, economic disruptions, religious strife, etc. in rural Germany in the 1800s. Anyone with German or German-Jewish ancestry will find this book enlighting, heartwarming, and sobering. The author truly succeeds in the difficult task of making history come alive. Other features of the book include lots of interesting and unusual illustrations, appendices on traditional Jewish life in the villages, guidelines for famly history researchers, and a lengthy bibliography.

My father was born in 1904 in a house next to the synagogue in a small village in southern Germany. As the only child and a male, he was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" and enjoyed his status by constantly getting into trouble with his friends and cousins. But not only did he describe his childhood pranks in an idyllic way, he also told tales of a small place where all the inhabitants knew each other and where Jews and Gentiles lived in harmony. Since my father's stories were in such contrast to those memoirs written later I often wondered if his wonderful boyhood was only the product of his immediate world or if life in these remote villages was so much better than the anti-Semitism of the cities. As a librarian and a tenacious researcher I began to look for an answer in the literature but could not find anything written in English about the history and society of rural Jews from non-rabbinical families.Just recently I have found a meticulously researched and detailed look at the lost culture of the Jews in rural southern Germany. Portraits of Our Past: Jews of the German Countryside by Emily Rose (Jewish Publication Society, 2001) describes the socioeconomic, political and historical lives of my grandparents and great grandparents and opens a window to a distinctive way of life not previously documented. This discovery is even more ironic since the author is a descendant of a family that settled in Chicago in 1857.From 1994-1999, the author spent two months each summer in Germany discovering her heritage and the lost world of rural German Jews. She eventually located 2,600 documents in Wurttemberg archives, some with only a line or two of relevant information, some with hundreds of pages. She examined 1,600 books in English and German. Materials had to be laboriously translated from Judeo-German, Hebrew and German, and about 30 people helped to translate the materials.The historical material is complemented by an excellent chapter on traditional Jewish life in the villages and small towns providing interesting information and local details of social and religious life. The final chapter, a "Blueprint for Researchers," is important for all researchers of German families. The author's work took years to accomplish, and knowledge of precise research techniques would have saved her "many hours of frustration."A notes chapter and a bibliography complete the book, which offers more than 75 photographs, maps, drawings, and documents. Many additional families are mentioned, a boon for researchers of the area, particularly when one realizes that 54 Jewish communities and 32 religious elementary schools functioned in 1871 in Wurttemberg. Portraits of Our Past is a unique example of how a simple genealogical research project developed into the social history of a lost community and culture.(Jerusalem Post 10-19-01)As a librarian I recommend Portraits of Our Past as an excellent scholarly resource that is accessible to all readers...

I just couldn't stop reading this book and was upset when I was done. I wanted to read more. This book should be read by all. It is history in a way that is more entertaining than just a history book and seen in a whole different aspect. The view of a child is something that I was not taught in school. I also learned of the countries that helped these "refugees" in a time of crisis.

This book is recommended highly!!!

This is a really moving book and exceedingly well written. In an age when everyone knows how to read, but almost no one knows what is worth reading, this book should be given wide publicity. The accounts are quite touching, with many homely details that make the reader feel he is right there observing the everyday lives of these children in their horrible circumstances. Teachers of college level courses on the Holocaust should consider putting this book on the reading lists of their students. It is beautifully illustrated with family photographs, and the editor has done a truly excellent job. I wish that it were ten times as long, so much did I learn by reading it!

These memoirs from four former classmates in a Berlin Jewish school in the mid-thirties are incredibly moving. They bring history down to the human level so oft forgotten and vividly describe the experiences of four young girls innocently caught in [...] extermination machinery from which they inexplicably and luckily escaped. The book is a reminder of 'the inhumanity of man against man' - of which we are all guilty even if we are not always aware of it. Having lived in Germany in the thirties myself, I couldn't put the book down and kept thinking 'there, but for the grace of god go I'. Highly recommendable.

I loved this book. I found it to be well written and I learned so much about what these children (now adults) went through in history's most shameful era. It is poignant, moving and at the same time, uplifting. I recommend this for all ages.

The four authors - Ellen Stein, Marcelle Robinson, Daisy Roessler, and Lisa Klein - have put their unusual stories and good writing style to print.

Sometimes true stories are more fascinating than fiction!

The combination of memoirs by these four friends, all of whom grew up in Berlin during the 1930's, bring to life what Germany was like for middle-class Jewish families at the beginning of the Nazi-Era in 1933, before and after the advent of Hitler. Each author also describes what it felt like to live in England during the war, and what adventures were experienced subsequently.

Ellen stein's detailed narrative includes a descriptiopn of pre-supermarket shopping in Berlin: getting the main ingredient for gefillte fish at a fishmonger, buying chicken at the Jewish butcher, and selecting items at the greengrocer to flavor the chicken soup.

Marcelle Robinson describes going to art school in England as a teenager, where young models for Life Drawing class were difficult to obtain due to the war. (Ellen Stein was also a student at this school at that time).

Daisy Roessler recounts what it felt like to make sure all windows were covered and lights out during a German air bombardment in London, and that when there was a full moon no attacks were likely. (Ellen Stein and Daisy Roessler were friends since age 6 in Berlin).

Lisa Klein tells of immigrating to Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, watching waterfront activities such as loading local produce and live cattle, and dealing with mosquitoes, ants, and cockroaches. (Ellen Stein and Lisa Klein, former classmates in 1938/39, met again in 2000 on a flight from New York to Berlin).

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I recently received this book and have looked forward to reading at least one chapter each day. The story flows very nicely with an interesting read (by no means boring) and the multiple pictures supplement the story for visual support. The book gives an entirely different glimpse into this officer's life and what it was like for him during the war as opposed to just being at sea and searching for ships to sink, etc. I love to read about submariner's from the World War II time era and this is certainly one of my top five reads.

I am a fan of autobiographical history, especially WWII and U-boats. The authors really try to be as factual as possible.
The book is based on recollections and diaries of Werner Hirschmann.
It is a book that is hard to put down and really makes you feel like you are in his shoes.

I have reviewd books in the past, but only review books that have made great impressions.
It has parts that may be too techincal for some, but that doesn't take away from the story and could be enjoyed by anyone who liked the book "Iron Coffins" or the movie "Das Boot".

I'm a big fan of Werner Hirschmann and am glad he let me read his diaries.

Stevie

An excelllent account of the war time life of a U-Boat officer,other than the commander. An interesting account of the what it took to be in the Kreigsmarine during and after the war.

I found the book well written and could not put it down. I reccomend the publication to anyone with even a passing interest in U-Boats.

One of the services with the highest casualty rate during World War II was the German U-Boat service. Of the 40,000 men who served in that branch, 28,000 were killed. Werner Hirschmann was one U-Boat officer that entered the German Navy in 1940 and served until 1945 when he and his boat surrendered to Canadian forces.

This book covers several different subjects. The first few chapters deal with his joining the Navy and the training he received. Then it's to see on a destroyer, including excort duty for the Bismark when it left for the Atlantic raid. Finally he is transfered to U-Boats with more training followed by going to war. Finally came the sixth and last patrol, ending in surrender.

There are two appendicies to the book. The first is a Pictorial Tour of the authors boat, the U-190 and the U-889, both type IXC long range boats. The type of submarines that were used in the patrols to North America, the Caribbean, the southern Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Orient. This pictorial tour is well illustrated. Mr. Hirschmann was the engineering officer on the boat, so as you would expect, these pictures feature most of the technical aspects of the boat. There is even a picture of the quite rare four rotor Navy Enigma machine.

The second and somewhat smaller appendix is titled Life on a U-Boat. Again, it is fairly technical in nature.

This is a splendid book, especially for the technically minded

For the U boat buff's this is a very good read. I own over 60 books on U Boats and would rank this in the top 10. Its very different from other books since its a focus on a person not so much as the boat. I found myself living the writers life. I would say its a must read and again different from many other U Boat books.

This was one of the most beautifully written memoirs of the Holocaust I've ever read. It is a very short book but Lucie Adelsberger manages to give the reader the feelings of horror of the times before in Berlin and during her stay in Auchwitz. She writes in beautiful prose giving me a feel for how people felt early on more than from anything I have previously read. It is poignant as she describes her conflict as a loving daughter and her duties as a physician. She does not go on and on and elaborate but says it all suscinctly. Her chapter on fear said it more clearly than anything I've read before; I felt the fear in her very descriptive prose. It is an excellent read on the Holocaust.

Excellant, a well written account of her experiences. She was one of the lucky ones.

Lucie Adelsberger's memoir of surviving Auschwitz, opens with a description of life in Berlin in 1938. "It began with only a few so called 'trifles,' " she says, citing three incidents which leapt out of the maelstrom of edicts and indignities to confront her with the relentless cruelty of the regime. The first of these limited Jews to public benches marked for them, thereby denying the elderly, many already displaced from their homes, the solace of parks. The second occurred when her elderly mother smiled at a functionary who processed her emigration papers. The official screamed at her mother for her effrontery.
"That's when I realized that these people were beyond the reach of human kindness," says Adelsberger. The third was the denial, after months of wrangling, of her mother's exit visa by the host country. Adelsberger realized finally that "the outside world didn't want to get involved."

Adelsberger missed her last chance to flee when her mother fell sick. As round-ups of Jews accelerated she found herself praying her mother would die before the SS came for her. Those prayers were answered but her own ordeal surpassed her worst imaginings.

In unadorned prose Adelsberger recounts life and the varieties of death at Auschwitz. Her voice is gentle, her eye sharp and compassionate, quick to note small ironies as well as gratuitous kindness and cruelty.

As a doctor, Adelsberger was assigned to the gypsy camp where an epidemic of typhus was raging. There were no medicines and hundreds died daily in their own filth. Why the camp commanders bothered with a hospital at all is a mystery which can be inadequately answered only by the Nazi passion for order.

Meticulous records were kept of everyone. One of the camp's most grueling rituals was the daily roll call. With 25 to 35,000 inmates in the women's camp alone, with the camp's policy of moving inmates from one section to another without notice, and with hundreds dying enroute to forced labor or hidden in a corner of their block, an exact roll call was difficult to achieve. Twice a day, before dawn and after work, inmates stood for roll call. This encompassed everyone except the dead and lasted one to two hours ý unless the tally did not match. "A roll call that lasted a day and a night without interruption was nothing unusual."

Roll call, the unexplained withholding of food from already starving people, forced labor, these were routine. Then there were the days that stood out. Sunday in the gypsy camp when gymnasts and musicians put on a show (the Gypsies were allowed to keep their possessions) and an audience of 16,000 sang and danced to music which ended abruptly with an order for "block confinement." After hours of waiting ý and the Gypsies know what they're waiting for ý the SS appear, calling out names and numbers. That night 2,500 Czech Gypsies were sent to the gas chambers.

Adelsberger also tells of strategies for survival, although she says no one expected to leave the camp alive. But certain work details ý the kitchen, the bathhouse where prisoners were stripped of their last possessions, the band, were coveted. Barter and communication systems were devised despite the dangers of detection.

But the vast majority worked in the mills or munitions factories or the potato bunker. Or they dug graves. The worst was reserved for young, healthy Jewish men. Totally isolated from the rest of the camp, they worked in the crematorium. After two or three months they too were gassed. "Sometime while at work, one never knew when, the valves of the gas chamber would close, the gas would be turned on, and ý a new Sonderkommando would replace the old."

A heart-rending memoir, yes, but it speaks as much for the beauties and strength of the human heart as for the incomprehensible monstrousness of the experience.

The horrors of the holocaust and the strength survivors had to conjure every second to endure, is beautifully captured by Lucie Adelsberger. Her documentation of the events leading up to Jewish deportation is artful in its simplicity, as each action taken by the Nazis builds upon the last with fatal consequences. This amazing book then takes the reader within the walls of Auschwitz and in exquisite detail invokes the memories of those who were lost as well as those who survived with unflinching honesty. This account documents the strength of the human spirit, and is one that should not be missed.

I loved this book, and I couldn't put it down. Great read about the Holocaust. Very chilling to see how the women in the death camps, especially Auschwitz were treated. The font is for 6th Graders, but I feel that it souldn't be read, for the graphic nature, until high school.

A very good read.