Showing results for "Refugee" in Military

How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters – his mother and his two aunts – grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing ‘Aryan’ status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler’s regime and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada's role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder.

The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving".

The police came for Peter Fleischmann in the early hours. It reminded the teenager of the Gestapo's moonlit roundups he had narrowly avoided at home in Berlin. Now, having endured a perilous journey to reach England—hiding from the rampaging Nazi thugs at his orphanage, boarding a Kindertransport to safety—here the aspiring artist was, on a ship bound for the Isle of Man, suspected of being a Nazi spy. What had gone wrong?

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story - the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors - has never been fully told. Author Mikhal Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as "special settlements".

When we hear the word "holocaust", we immediately remember the dark days, the blood, the people, and the pain that no words can express. This huge event, daunting as it can be, left a mark in the lives of the people who experienced it and even those who have only heard of it. The Nazis not only brought destruction, but they brought an unforgettable scar amongst the human race. At those times, the victims would have called for a savior, someone who could literally take them out from the hell they were living in.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no qualms about using native German speakers from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany itself. The majority were Jews who had fled persecution. Two examples of these secret units were X Troop Commandos and the Special Interrogation Group. The SIG men deserve their legendary status. They fought, and often died, wearing Wehmacht uniform. As this book reveals that, after infiltrating Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps, one detachment even drew Nazi pay.

For more than 15 years, award-winning journalist Sophie McNeill has reported on some of the most war-ravaged and oppressive places on earth, including Syria, Gaza, Yemen, West Bank and Iraq. In We Can't Say We Didn't Know, Sophie tells the human stories of devastation and hope behind the headlines—of children, families and refugees, of valiant doctors, steadfast dissidents and Saudi women seeking asylum. These innocent civilians bear the brunt of the lawlessness of the current age of impunity, where war crimes go unpunished and human rights are abused.

Here the emotional journeys of two German Jewish refugees are reconstructed from a substantial collection of family material, archives and secondary historical sources, which are used imaginatively to explore and illuminate a wider history. The letters evoke how it felt at the time to be a refugee and express eloquently the distress and losses involved in exile, separation and internment, providing intense dynamic snapshots of how they managed their emotions from day to day. The author shows the complex interrelationship between personal lives and social/historical events.

This is a unique first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in Britain and Canada during World War II. Its immediacy is what makes it such a valuable eyewitness account. While there are other memoirs written decades after internment, Walter Igersheimer wrote this book shortly after he was deported from Canada because the Liberal government in the 1940s did not want Jews to become Canadian citizens.

Based on years of research and interviews with Mayer himself, whom the author was able to meet only months before his death at the age of 94, Return to the Reich is an enlightening, unforgettable narrative of World War II heroism.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

Memories of an Italian Holocaust refugee as told to his son.

The word “refugee” sparks conversation and fuels emotion. There are more than 22 million refugees worldwide and another 65 million who have been forcibly displaced. But who are these people? Images filter into our consciousness via dramatic photographs - but these photos only offer a glimpse into their stories. As a young ER nurse in Boston, Roberta Gately was stopped cold by stark images of big-bellied babies with empty haunting stares in the news. She called the aid organization featured in the news story, and, within two months, she had become a humanitarian aid worker.

In the years preceding the height of the European Holocaust’s worst atrocities, Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, confronted the world with a moral test. His early experiment of allowing Jews to seek homelands elsewhere came to define his future course of action toward the Jewish population of the continent. The acidic hatred he bore for the Jewish presence in European society was clear enough, but the leader of the Nazi Party could not precisely gauge the international community’s likely response to a campaign of extreme abuse directed against his own citizens.

In June 1942, the US Army began recruiting immigrants, the children of immigrants, refugees, and others with language skills and knowledge of enemy lands and cultures for a special military intelligence group being trained in the mountains of northern Maryland and sent into Europe and the Pacific. Ultimately, 15,000 men and some women received this specialized training and went on to make vital contributions to victory in World War II.