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The son of a Polish furrier, Werber was sent to the Nazi slave labor camp at Buchenwald during World War II. He was a barracks clerk and heard from a new arrival that the Nazis had killed his wife and his 3-year-old daughter. He felt he had nothing to live for, until a short time later when a trainload of 2,000 new prisoners arrived -- including many young boys. Thoughts of his wife and daughter "drove me in my obsession to save children," he said later. Rather than let the boys be shipped off to death camps, he was able to hide most of the boys in the barracks he was responsible for. It was August 1944, and many of the guards knew the end of the war was near. They kept quiet about the scheme when they found out and, fearing war crimes trials told him, "Remember that I did this for you." More than 700 of the children survived. Werber knew the odds: he himself had arrived at the camp with around 3,200 other men; only he and 10 others of that group survived the camp. After the war Werber emigrated to the United States, where he started a manufacturing business. He died in New York on November 18 from a heart attack at 92. From This is True for 19 November 2006 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: John Boyne List Price: $8.99 Amazon Price: $8.99 Editorial Review: Berlin 1942 When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences. From the Hardcover edition.  By: Rudolf Höss List Price: $18.95 Amazon Price: $12.89 Editorial Review: SS Kommandant Rudolph Höss (1900–1947) was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss’s autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial. This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.  By: Heinz Heger List Price: $10.95 Amazon Price: $8.76 Editorial Review: It has only been since the mid-1970s that any attention has been paid to the persecution and interment of gay men by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Since that time, books such as Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle (and Martin Sherman's play Bent) have illuminated this nearly lost history. Heinz Heger's first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was one of the first books on the topic and remains one of the most important. In 1939, Heger, a Viennese university student, was arrested and sentenced to prison for being a "degenerate." Within weeks he was transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality. He remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the war in 1945. The power of The Men with the Pink Triangle comes from Heger's sparse prose and his ability to recall--and communicate--the smallest resonant details. The pain and squalor of everyday camp life--the constant filth, the continuous presence of death, and the unimaginable cruelty of those in command--are all here. But Heger's story would be unbearable were it not for the simple courage he and others used to survive and, having survived, that he bore witness. This book is harrowing but necessary reading for everyone concerned about gay history, human rights, or social justice. --Michael Bronski  By: Robert H. Abzug List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $17.96 Editorial Review: Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.  By: Bernhard Rammerstorfer List Price: $22.95 Amazon Price: $17.21 Editorial Review: The iron Nazi fist came down fast and hard on Leopold Engleitner, but he would not bend to terror. Unbroken Will describes the life and times of an ordinary man whose belief in God and in nonviolence stood the fiery test of Nazi persecution. In thre |
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