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Justice at Dachau by Joshua M. GreeneJustice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene

Thanks to Jill Nuppenau of Ankerwycke Publishing, I am giving away one print copy of Justice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene.

Description of Justice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene

2017 marks the 70th anniversary of the Dachau trials, the single largest yet least-known series of war crimes trials in history. Bestselling  and award winning biographer Joshua M. Greene (Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, Here Comes the Sun, Swami in a Strange Land) has written the definitive account of the trials as seen through the eyes of the chief prosecutor. Col. Bill Denson, a humble lawyer from Alabama, had no experience of war, yet he succeeded in winning due process verdicts against the operators of Hitler’s concentration camps–and nearly lost his life in the process.

In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining charges for crimes that courts had never before confirmed. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human bone lamps made headlines worldwide.

Denson, just 32 years old, with one criminal trial to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to prevent justice from being undone.

Originally published in hardcover by Random House in 2001, this is the first time Justice at Dachau is available in paperback.

About Joshua M. GreeneJustice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene

The New York Times described Joshua M. Greene as “a storyteller…who traces journeys to enlightenment.” In 1982, after living thirteen years in the ashrams of India and Europe, he returned to his native New York City and produced a series of Emmy award-nominated children’s films for The Disney Channel and PBS. In 1995, he became Director of Programming for Cablevision, the nation’s fifth largest cable provider.

From 1999 to 2002 he served as Senior Vice President at Ruder Finn, New York’s largest public relations firm, where he advised faith communities on their role in peacekeeping initiatives. In 2000, Mr. Greene was appointed Director of Strategic Planning for the United States Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders. That year, his book Witness: Voices from the Holocaust was produced as a feature film for PBS.

His next book, Justice at Dachau, revealed the story of the largest yet least known series of war crimes trials in history. His editorials on tribunals in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune. Mr. Greene is a frequent lecturer and has spoken at the Pentagon, the World Economic Forum, the New York Public Library Distinguished Author series, and numerous universities. He serves on the boards of several non-profits and provides volunteer family meditation services.

Giveaway of Justice at Dachau by Joshua M. Greene

This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on April 28, 2017 midnight pacific time.  Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Marceline Loridan-IvensDescription of But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens


“You might come back, because you’re young, but I will not come back.”—Marceline Loridan’s father to her, 1944

A runaway bestseller in France, But You Did Not Come Back has already been the subject of a French media storm and hailed as an important new addition to the library of books dealing with the Holocaust. It is the profoundly moving and poetic memoir by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who at the age of fifteen was arrested in occupied France, along with her father. Later, in the camps, he managed to smuggle a note to her, a sign of life that made all the difference to Marceline—but he died in the Holocaust, while Marceline survived.
 In But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline writes back to her father, the man whose death overshadowed her whole life. Although her grief never diminished in its intensity, Marceline ultimately found her calling, working as both an activist and a documentary filmmaker. But now, as France and Europe in general faces growing anti-Semitism, Marceline feels pessimistic about the future.

Her testimony is a memorial, a confrontation, and a deeply affecting personal story of a woman whose life was shattered and never totally rebuilt.

My Thoughts On But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens


I have read many fictional, non-fiction, and memoirs about the Holocaust.  I just can’t seem to get enough of the subject.  I think it is a deer in the headlights kind of thing, I keep wondering how humanity can let this happen.  Yet, similar things keep happening to this day.  How is shooting or bombing mass amounts of people, much different than making them work in forced labor and then gassing them to death so different?  I personally don’t think it is.  They are all evil.

In ‘But You Did Not Come Back’, 15 year old Marceline Loridan-Ivens is taken with her father from France to the camps during WWII and the Holocaust.  They are in neighboring camps and her father manages to get a note to her which lifts her spirits.  She is relieved to know he is still alive.  However, by the time she is rescued, she finds out he did not make it. 

When she returns to France she is reunited with her mother and other family members who were able to hide when her father and herself were taken.  They can’t possibly understand what she went though and it was hard for her to relate to them the same way as before.  It is hard for her to just go on as if nothing had ever happened.  However, she does find a way to move on.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens writes a poetic almost meditative account of her experience during the Holocaust.  It is deeply moving and had me in tears, in parts.  However, She is a survivor and an inspiration to us all!  She has gone on to work as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director. 

5/5

I received the ebook version via Net Galley for my honest review.

About Marceline Loridan-Ivens


Marceline Loridan-Ivens was born in 1928. She has worked as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director. She directed “The Birch-Tree Meadow” in 2003, starring Anouk Aimee, as well as several documentaries with Joris Ivens.


About Sandra Smith

Sandra Smith is the translator of “Suite Francaise” and eleven other novels by Irene Nemirovsky, as well as a new translation of Camus s “L Etranger.” She has been awarded the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize and the PEN Translation Prize. She lives in New York.”

 

 

I received the following in my email from a publicity firm.  Most of the time I just delete emails that ask me to post something, etc but this one moved me to tears.  

Jill Klein

GeneKlein

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Please read the following and remember Gene Klien, the German who helped him survive, his father, mother, and all those who survive and didn’t survive the Holocaust!

Please Remember: Holocaust Remembrance Day by Gene Klein

It has been 70 years since I was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. I was just a teenager then; I’m 87 now.  Holocaust Remembrance Day is April 15th, and I have been thinking about what I want you and your loved ones to remember about the Holocaust. I speak frequently about my experiences, and I am able to remind people about what happened, provide them with vivid descriptions, and answer their questions. But I am among the last of the survivors, and one day—sooner than I would like to think—we will all be gone.

Here is what I want you to remember after we are gone, when our memories must become yours, so that future generations will have the knowledge and compassion to avoid the mistakes of the past:

Please remember the life we had before it all started; before the name-calling, the bricks through the windows, long before the cattle cars and the camps. I was born into a middle class Hungarian family in a small town in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. Our town was charming. We sat in outdoor cafes on summer evenings, and skated on the river on winter afternoons. My father owned a hardware store, was an avid soccer fan, and loved to tend to his garden. My mother took care of my two sisters and me, and was preoccupied with getting me—a naturally skinny kid—to eat more. We were not wealthy, but we had everything we needed. In the most basic of ways, we were not unlike you and your family. And we felt as secure as you do now.

Please remember that all of this was taken away. Within a few weeks in the spring of 1944, my father’s store was confiscated, my Jewish friends and I were told that we were no longer welcome at school, and we were forced to wear a yellow star. Then we were forced from our home, crowded into cattle cars, and taken to Auschwitz. When we arrived, the men were separated from the women, and then my father was separated from me.

My father had been a POW in World War I, and during his years of imprisonment he learned to play the violin and to speak five languages. He was intelligent and humorous. I loved him the way any 16-year-old boy loves a wonderful father. The way you love your father, if you are lucky enough to have a good one. So imagine this: a man in a black uniform sends you to one direction and your father to another. You don’t know why, until the next day a veteran prisoner points up at the smoke coming out of a chimney and says, “Your father is up there.” Please remember my father.

Please remember that it is terribly easy for one group to strike another group off the roster of humanity, to see others as vermin or pests, as an affliction that must be destroyed. It happens again and again. And once it does, people are capable of inflicting terrible hardship and pain on others, and to feel they are righteous in doing so. None of the SS officers who ordered me—a starving teenager—to carry heavy steel rails up a hillside thought of themselves as monsters. They were adhering to their beliefs, and they were serving their country. We must be constantly vigilant for the descent that takes us from self-righteous beliefs, to the dehumanization of others and into the sphere of violence.

Please remember that while we are capable of all of this, we can also rise to amazing heights in the service of others. For two weeks I had the good fortune to have a respite from hard labor while I was assigned to work with a civilian German engineer who was surveying the landscape where future roads would be built. He saw the terrible conditions I was living under and decided to help. Everyday he hid food for me from the SS kitchen where he ate lunch. Chicken, milk, rice, and cheese left under a bench in the back corner of a barracks. He cared, he took a risk, and he saved my life. Please remember him.

And finally, remember that no one should be judged because of his or her nationality, religion or race. We were sent to the camps because propaganda was believed, individuality was erased, and hate was rampant. When asked if I am angry with Germans, I think of the German engineer, and know that individuals must be judged by their own personal actions. If I can hold this as a guiding principle after what happened to my family and me, then you can, too.

Please take my memories as yours, share them, and carry them forward. It is by doing so that you can help keep the next generation from forgetting, and help fill the space that we survivors will leave behind when we are gone.

Thank you so much Gene for sharing this moving piece.  I will always remember!

Gene’s Daughter Jill Wrote a book about her family’s struggles in Auschwitz, ‘We Got the Water’.

Description of ‘We Got the Water by Jill Gabrielle Klein:water_cover_front-final-cropped


We Got the Water is the story of the Klein family: Herman and Bertha, and their three children, Lilly, Oli and sixteen-year-old Gabi. In the spring and summer of 1944, along with more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews, they were forced from their homes, rounded up, and sent to Auschwitz. The Kleins were aboard one of the very first trains of this mass deportation.

Author Jill Gabrielle Klein follows her father, his sisters and their mother through Auschwitz and into slave labor camps in Poland and Germany, providing a narrative—both harrowing and inspirational—of resilience in the face of terror. As it charts the author’s personal quest to reconstruct the past, the book also documents the inexorable disappearance of living Holocaust survivors, whose first-person accounts illuminate this dark period and inscribe it in our collective memory.

About Jill Klein:Gene & Jill Klein


 Professor Jill Klein, Ph.D. is a social psychologist who is on the faculty of Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She and her father speak internationally to audiences on the topic of resilience.