New Releases by Stephen Glantz

On 21 July 1942 the Nazis invaded Poland. In the small town of Zolkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Kramer, Clara b. 1927, was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug cellar. Living above and protecting them were the Becks.

Ausgerechnet ein Nazi versteckt Clara und ihre jüdische Familie in einem Erdloch unter seinem Haus. Clara gelingt es, dort Tagebuch zu führen. Sie beschreibt die entsetzliche Enge, das grausame Stillhalten-Müssen und die Todesangst, wenn über ihrem Kopf die deutschen Besatzer ihre Reden schwingen, die Dielenbretter unter den Stiefeln ächzen. Mehr als sechzig Jahre danach erzählt sie nun ihr Schicksal: wie trotz des Kriegs stets die Hoffnung in ihrem Herzen weiterlebte – und sie gerettet wurde. Eine Handbreit Hoffnung von Clara Kramer und Stephen Glantz: im eBook erhältlich!

In the classic vein of The Diary of Anne Frank—a heart-wrenching and inspiring story of a life lived in fear and cramped quarters—Clara’s War is a true story of the Holocaust. Cara Kramer was a typical Polish-Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara''s family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsche (ethnically German) family from their town. Mrs. Beck worked as Clara''s family''s housekeeper. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families. Eighteen people in all lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks'' basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she spent in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life—from the house''s catching fire to Mr. Beck''s affair with Clara''s neighbor; from the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp. Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent col-lection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.