In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp's three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell's Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the Holocaust. His mother's side of the family, numbering thirty people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Without exception they escaped the Final Solution.
Hell's Traces tells the story of the two families' divergent paths. To spark the past to life, he embarks on a journey to visit Holocaust memorials throughout Europe.
A memorial in Warsaw that includes a boxcar like the ones that carried Jews to Auschwitz compels Ripp to contemplate the horror of Alexandre's transport to his death. One in Berlin that invokes the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s allows him to better understand how his mother's family escaped the Nazis. In Paris he stumbles across a playground dedicated to the memory of the French children who were deported, Alexandre among them. Ultimately, Ripp sees thirty-five memorials in six countries. He encounters the artists who designed the memorials, historians who recall the events that are memorialized, and survivors with their own stories to tell.
A brilliant, haunting, and profoundly original portrait of the defining tragedy of our time.In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the...
“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book Review Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bes...
I Shall Live tells the gripping true story of a Jewish family in Germany and Russia as the Nazi party gains power in Germany. When Henry Orenstein and his siblings end up in a series of concentrations camps, Orenstein's bravery and quick thinking he...
"A most valuable book." —Christian Science MonitorFor readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return ...
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, ...
The definitive account of Germany's malign transformation under Hitler's total rule and the implacable march to war
This magnificent second volume of Richard J. Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany was hailed by Benjamin Schwartz of the ...
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, be...
The candid, poignant, unforgettable writing of the young girl whose own life story has become an everlasting source of courage and inspiration.Hiding from the Nazis in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, a thirteen...
Confronting Nazi evil is the subject of the latest installment in the mega-bestselling Killing seriesAs the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the...
