The camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau were an important part of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. Over one million people were murdered in its gas chambers and tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death in the nearby sub-camps. Others were held in the quarantine area before they were deported to work in the Third Reich. This is the story of the development of Auschwitz from a Polish prison camp into a concentration camp, and a thorough account of the building of Birkenau and the gas chambers, which grew into industrial killing machines. Rawson relates what life was like for... View More...
This biography of Frank Cobbold opens when Frank goes to sea on a Clipper aged 14. It follows him through inexperience as a Fijian trader who escaped the cannibals' cook pot and survived one of the worst hurricanes in living memory. In Australia he learned the skills of a surveyor and quickly became a sought-after and trusted station manager. Despite problems that would have defeated a less resolute man he took droughts, cheats and unyielding land tenure regulations in his stride to become one of Australia's great pioneering pastoralists. Admired by fellow bushmen, trusted by his partners a... View More...
Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the ten years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria ... View More...
It was a shocking crime that made headlines around Australia. An innocent young woman, violently attacked in her family home by a total stranger and left to die. Beaten repeatedly and soaked with petrol as her home burned, Lauren Huxley's life was hanging by a thread. Lauren's battle to survive caused an outpouring of public love and support. For her father, Patrick, mother Christine and sister Simone it was like being plunged into hell. Doctors gave Lauren only a five percent chance of survival. Her injuries were among the worst they had ever seen, so horrific that she was barely recognisable... View More...
Goodbye to Italia by Marisa Parker. A pretty little Italian girl skips outside to peer up at the unexpected drone of aeroplanes, unaware of the danger as her neighbour, an eccentric opera singer, fervently prays for her teenage son. It is the start of WWII. An age difference of thirteen years separates the little girl Mariolina Martore and the army officer Eugenio Piergiovanni, but their lives are destined to intertwine. Mariolina is a timid but stalwart child who lives with her mother and grandmother. During the war years, they endure bombings, cold, hunger, and disease in Torino, Northern I... View More...
He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield tells his incredible life story. Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age fifteen and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield came face to face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp--and how an SS soldier's shi... View More...
"Stories that history forgot... but readers will remember." "The only thing new in the world," said Harry S. Truman, "is the history you don't know." In this fascinating collection of historical vignettes, Martin W. Sandler (author of "Resolute" and "Atlantic Ocean") restores to memory important events, people, and developments that have been lost to time. Though barely known today, these are major historical stories, from Ziryab, an eighth-century black slave whose influence on music, cuisine, fashion, and manners still reverberates, to Cahokia, a twelfth-century city north of the Rio Grande,... View More...
More to the Story looks beyond negative media reports, political speeches and fear-mongering statistics to tell human stories of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. Rosemary Sayer writes with empathy and humility of her interviews with refugees from Burma, Afghanistan and South Sudan. Together, they tell stories of persecution, violence and starvation; families separated for a time, or forever; the desperation of thousands in refugee camps, awaiting relocation under humanitarian programs; the perilous journeys by boat of those for whom waiting would have meant death; life in mandatory d... View More...
This autobiography describes the hours before and after Terry Waite was taken hostage in January 1987 in Beirut. Waite analyzes his thoughts and feelings immediately prior to captivity - what was the nature of his role as envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury? What was his relationship with the Americans and Colonel Oliver North? The book looks at Waite from his upbringing in Styal, Cheshire, until after his release in November 1991, when he had become one of the best-known figures of his time. It is an account of his years in solitary confinement and of the inner strengths which enabled him ... View More...