San Antonio College Library

The true story of how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw -- and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Żabińskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts....

"In a turn-of-the-century, once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue in the center of Warsaw, 10 Jewish families began reconstructing their lives after the Holocaust. While most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, these families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, intensive...

"Marcel Reich-Ranicki was born of Polish Jewish parents in the Polish town of Wloclawek in 1920. At the age of nine he moved to Berlin and it was at school there that he discovered his deep passion for literature and the theatre. But in 1938, he was deported back to Poland, where he spent the war. Written with subtlety, intelligence and lucidity, Reich-Ranicki's account of the Warsaw Ghetto and the relations between Poles and Jews, Poles and Germans,...

Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.

Described as an "application of historical sociology, not a work of conventional history", the work assesses why the destruction of the Jews was not uniformly effective throughout Europe. Three factors determined Nazi success - the extent of German control, the activity of national resistance movements, and the extent of antisemitism in the prewar period. Pt. 1 (p. 3-194) discusses the will of the Germans to annihilate the Jews, and its origins; the...

Why did the Polish underground Home Army call for what proved to be a suicidal uprising? Why did they decide that their poorly armed troops should alone liberate Warsaw shortly before the Soviet entry into the capital? Why were the approaching Russians not informed? Why did the Red Army fail to take Warsaw in the first days of August 1944 as both Stalin and Bor-Kornorowski had anticipated? Dr Ciechanowski examines in detail the political, diplomatic,...

This potent documentary uses a long-lost film reel to illustrate how the Nazis controlled and manipulated images of Jewish life during World War II. Though the Nazis made a propaganda movie of contented Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the missing spool exposes the truth. Director Yael Hersonski shows how the imagery was staged to distort historical knowledge and, with the aid of Jewish survivors' testimony, chronicles the horrifying reality of ghetto life....

It was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy--and a time of transcendent courage and determination. Leon Uris's blazing novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.