Nechama Tec - Böcker

This is the true story of Nechama Tec, whose family found refuge with Polish Christians during the Holocaust. Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to "pass in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is unique celebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.

Few lives shed more light on the complex relationship between Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust that that of teenage Polish Jew, Oswald Rufeisen.Fluent in German, Rufeisen became a translator for the Nazi gendamerie, using his position to pass secret information about impending `aktions'. When denounced, he was smuggled into a Carmelite convent by his sympathetic German commander, and later fought as a Soviet partisan. He converted to Catholicism and became a priest, but the now Father Daniel still insisted on the automatic Israeli citizenship granted to Jews, and fought for his right throughout the 1960s.This stirring biography also reflects the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and tolerance and prejudice in this critical era of Jewish history.

Nechama Tec's incisive account of the rescue of Jews by Christians in Nazi-occupied Poland draws heavily on her own childhood experiences. Her in-depth study - the first of its kind - contrasts the attitudes and behaviour of altruistic helpers, and paid rescuers. She discovers a fascinating pattern, in which altruistic Christians applied their customary practise of helping the needy, without regard for their own safety, whereas paid rescuers acted with the motive of removing the Jews and the danger they represented to Poland. This is a deeply affecting book, which deals squarely with the ingrained anti-Semitism in Polish society, yet pays tribute to the extraordinary risks taken by Polish people on behalf of their Jewish compatriots.

A riveting history of a group of Jewish fighters who fought for the survival and rescue of other Jews in western Belorussia and who would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944 - the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II.

A Jew passing as a Christian in occupied Poland during WWII, Oswald Rufeisen worked as translator and personal secretary to a Nazi commander of the German police, repeatedly risking his life to save hundreds from the Nazis. A relatively unknown Jewish hero and rescuer at the magnitude of Oskar Schindler, Rufeisen's life and role during the Holocaust is perhaps even more riveting and complex than the man memorialized by Stephen Spielberg in Schindler's List. Only seventeen years old when WWII began, Rufeisen joined the exodus of Poles who fled the approaching German army. Bright and talented, Rufeisen used his ability to speak fluent German to pass as half German and half Polish in Mir, where he came to serve the German commander in charge of the gendarmerie. As he carried out his duties - reading death sentences to prisoners, swearing in new police officers before a portrait of Hitler - he earned the trust and affection of the German commander, yet lived in constant fear of discovery. He used his position to pass secret information to Jews and Christians about impending "Aktionen" and to sabotage Nazi plans. Most notably, he thwarted the annihilation of the Mir ghetto by arming hundreds of Jews and organizing their escape, and saved an entire Belorussian village from destruction. Eventually discovered and denounced, Rufeisen escaped and found shelter in a convent, where he converted to Catholicism. Though a pacifist, he spent the rest of the war fighting in a Russian partisan unit, similar to the Bielski unit of Tec's Defiance. After the war, Father Daniel (as he came to be known) became a priest and a Carmelite monk. Identifying himself as a Christian Jew and an ardent Zionist, he moved to Israel, where he challenged the Law of Return in a case that reached the High Court and attracted international attention. In the Lion's Den, from author Nechama Tec of Defiance and several other astonishing accounts of Jewish survival and rescue during the Holocaust, offers a stirring portrait of a Jewish rescuer during the Holocaust and its aftermath, illuminating the intricate connections between good and evil, cruelty and compassion, and Judaism and Christianity.

A common perception of Jews during World War II is that they were passive and submissive in the face of German oppression. In Resistance, Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec questions the validity of this widely held assumption, arguing that rather than making empty claims about Jewish passivity or heroics during the Holocaust, a systematic comparison of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance is needed. Using firsthand accounts and interviews, Tec examines the four main settings of the war--ghetto, concentration camp, forest and countryside, and the Aryan world--and describes what life was like for Jews and non-Jews in each. Tec's comparisons show that even when Jewish and non-Jewish groups were in the same place at the same time, each faced vastly different conditions, and opportunities for Jewish resistance were far scarcer and more complicated than for their non-Jewish counterparts. Given the unique Jewish predicament, Tec explains that Jewish resistance had different aims--in particular, Jewish efforts emphasized recovery of dignity and salvation of lives, rather than large-scale thwarting of their oppressors. This illuminating book also explores the larger concept of resistance, often too narrowly equated with armed attempts or too broadly equated with attempts merely to survive. Tec brilliantly argues that resistance is dependent on the oppressed party's intent and the particular nature of the oppression faced. Closely reasoned and eloquently constructed, Resistance reinvigorates the discussion about resistance in World War II.

Nechama Tec’s groundbreaking insights into the different experiences of Jewish women and men during the HolocaustIn this, Nechama Tec’s fifth book on the Holocaust, vivid individual stories blend effortlessly with detailed comparisons of wartime experiences of women and men. The result is a captivating account of how the coping strategies and the ultimate fate of each sex differed. Tec, as always, listens to the voices of the oppressed, voices that originated in wartime diaries, postwar memoirs, archival materials, and her own interviews with survivors and rescuers. Concentrating on life under extreme conditions, Tec’s research uncovers the previously overlooked significance of mutual cooperation and compassion that operated across gender lines.

Author Richard S. Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew - his father's mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard's father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn that his father saved the lives of many Polish Jews, but - despite heroic efforts - could not save his family.