• Growing up in Holland, Bart van Es
always knew that his grandparents
sheltered Jewish children during the war,
but didn’t know any details. As an adult
in England, he began an investigation
into one girl, Lien, who had been hidden
the same time as Anne Frank but, as van
Es discovered, had survived the war. In
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and
Family, Lost and Found (Penguin; due
out Aug. 2018), van Es tells a story of
survival, decency and love.
• The fi rst fi ve years of Edgar Feuchtwanger’s life were spent
playing with toys and listening to his mother master new classics
on the piano in his Jewish family’s home in Munich — until a new
neighbor with a little black mustache moved in across the street.
Written by historian Feuchtwanger (with Bertil Scali) at the age of
88, Hitler, My Neighbor: Memories of a Jewish Childhood,
1929-1939 (Other Press) chronicles 10 years of the author’s life
as he watches Hitler from inside the windows of his home as the
world around him crumbles.
• For more than 400 years, the East European border town
of Buczacz, today part of Ukraine, was home to Poles,
Ukrainians and Jews, all living side by side in relative harmony.
With the arrival of World War II, within a few years, the entire
Jewish population had been murdered by German and
Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish
residents. In Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death
of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster), author Omer
Bartov (whose mother was raised in Buczacz) shows how
genocide can take root at the local level — turning neighbors,
friends, even family members, against each other.
• Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge
Klarsfeld (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a dual memoir
recounting how the Klarsfelds’ childhoods — hers as a
non-Jew in Nazi Germany, his as a Jewish refugee in Vichy,
France — led them to be partners in love and as renowned
Nazi hunters. French activists and journalists, the Klarsfelds
followed their consciences to bring Nazis to justice when
murderers often resumed free lives following the Nuremburg
trials. Among the most prominent of their conquests
was Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” who was fi nally
extradited from South America to face trial.
• “My dear, good child! I haven’t had any news from you in a
long time. Are you in good health?” Seemingly everyday items of
letters and postcards — like the one containing these warm and
loving lines — now represent more than just a message. They
represent lives, hopes and history, as they were written during
the darkest days of the Holocaust under tyrannical censorship.
In Holocaust Postal History: Harrowing Journeys
Revealed through the Letters and Cards of the Victims
(Six Point Watermark), postal historian Justin Gordon takes
readers through the darkness of the Holocaust using actual
correspondence written by the victims.
• On the eve of Passover 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto
staged a now-legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors.
In The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture (Penn
State Univ. Press), author Samantha Baskind explores how
the despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its
inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination.
Seventy years’ worth of fi ne art, fi lm, television, radio, theater,
comics and more have artistically represented the ghetto and
revolt, serving as a staging ground for the forging of the Jewish
American identity.
MY OPPOSITION
T H E D I A RY O F F R I ED R I CH K ELLN ER
A German against the Third Reich
• Friedrich Kellner, a mid-level offi cial in
a provincial German town, risked his life
to record Germany’s path to dictatorship
and genocide and to protest his
countrymen’s complicity in the regime’s
brutalities. My Opposition: The Diary of
Friedrich Kellner (Cambridge University
Press), edited by Robert Scott Kellner
(Friedrich’s grandson), tells what it is like
to be an isolated democrat in a highly
popular dictatorship.
E D I T E D BY
ROB ERT S COT T K ELLNER
• In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews
and the Great War (Yale), historian Tim
Grady examines the First World War —
when the roots of Nazism were planted
— as a disastrous turning point for
Germany’s Jews. Illuminating the efforts
of some 100,000 Jewish soldiers who
served in the German military as well as
various activities that Jewish communities
supported at home, such as raising funds
for the war effort, Grady traces a path
from the trenches of the First World War
to the death camps of the Second.
• Growing up in the safety of Britain,
Jonathan Wittenberg was deeply aware
of his legacy as the child of refugees from
Nazi Germany. After the death of a family
member, he discovers an old suitcase
among her belongings containing a
bundle of wartime letters, untouched for
decades. My Dear Ones: One Family
and the Final Solution (William Collins;
due April 2018) tells the story of author
Wittenberg’s quest to uncover the painful
details of his family history.
• Leon Werth (1878-1955) was the
celebrated French author of 11 novels, of
art and dance criticism, acerbic political
reporting and memorable personal
essays. In Deposition 1940-1944: A
Secret Diary of Life in Vichy, France
(Oxford Univ. Press; due April 2018)
— widely hailed in France and now
published in English for the fi rst time —
Werth gives a very readable account of
daily life in the Nazi-occupied village of
Vichy, where he was hiding. •
jn
April 5 • 2018
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