Friday, September 21, 2012

Aytz Chaim Foundation Offers Free Books to Public Libraries

Thanks to CTLS Deputy Director Laurie Mahaffey, we were introduced to Mr. "Tank" Rubinett of Aytz Chaim Foundation and that nonprofit's offer to send a compendium of books about the Holocaust to Texas public libraries. The organization will pay for the books and ship them, postage paid.

Mr. Rubinett is passionately trying to get into as many public libraries as possible a compendium of books that each cover the Holocaust from a different perspective. The compendium currently includes eight titles, but it eventually should include the third book of the trilogy, which is just hitting the press, plus one additional book he hopes to add soon. 

The organization doesn't keep a really large inventory in stock - in part because they raise funds to purchase the inventory and sometimes need time to raise those funds first. NTLP staff has made arrangements with Mr. Rubinett so that your public library may submit your order through NTLP, and NTLP will forward orders to Mr. Rubinett as we collect them. 

If you would like to order any quantity of any or all of the titles, visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HolocaustCompendiumRequests and place your order as soon as you have time to do so. The Foundation will need to determine how much funding they will need and make plans to raise those funds in order to purchase and ship the items you request.

If, upon receiving the gift book/s, you would like to insert a gift or memorial book plate in these books or otherwise list them as contributions to the collection, the donor is Aytz Chaim Foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity of Congregation Agudas Achim of Austin, TX.

These are the titles included in the currently eight-book compendium.
  • Buchenwald Trilogy, Volume IThe beasts of Buchenwald : Karl & Ilse Koch, human-skin lampshades, and the war-crimes trial of the century / Flint Whitlock. First edition. Brule, Wisconsin : Cable Publishing, 2011, ©2011. How was it possible that Karl and Ilse Koch, a seemingly ordinary couple who ran Naz Germany's most infamous concentration camp, could have been loving parents while brutalizing prisoners and committing some of the worst atrocities known to mankind? This searing account exposes the whole ghastly story. Flint Whitlock is a Pulitzer-nominated author and military historian and has been called “One of America's leading military historians” by World War II magazine. 
  • Buchenwald Trilogy, Volume IISurvivor of Buchenwald : my personal odyssey through hell / Louis Gros, Flint Whitlock. 1st Ed. Brule, WI : Cable Pub., 2012. “I was only seventeen years old when the knock on our door came late one night. The French police barged in, arresting me and my father as members of the French Resistance. After months of incarceration in French prisons, two thousand inmates were jammed into twenty rail cars. Our destination was Buchenwald, the most horrific camp in Nazi Germany, where we were viewed by our SS keepers as expendable sub-humans and forced to work as slave laborers. I was beaten and starved. I witnessed brutal tortures and senseless murders. But I survived.”
  • The four-front war : from the Holocaust to the Promised Land / by William R. Perl. New York : Crown Publishers, c1979. from a Kirkus Review: “William Perl, an American psychologist born in Prague, organized and led Irgun attempts to smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany and Central Europe from 1937 through the first years of World War II. [He] seeks to publicize Irgun actions, via its youth movement Betar, in saving thousands of lives--despite overwhelming opposition--before the implementation of the Final Solution and before the Jewish leadership thought it propitious to act.”
  • Gated grief : the daughter of a GI concentration camp liberator discovers a legacy of trauma / Leila Levinson. Brule, WI : Cable Pub., 2011. After the death of her father, a WWII Army doctor, Leila Levinson discovers shocking photos he had taken of a Nazi slave-labor camp.  When she learns that he suffered a breakdown after treating the camp's survivors, she seeks out and interviews dozens of WWII veterans who also liberated Nazi concentration camps, all of them unprepared for the unimaginable horrors they found. In this groundbreaking portrait of trauma’s legacy, Gated Grief reveals how the unspoken memories still imprisoning WWII veterans have affected their loved ones as well.
  • History on trial : my day in court with a Holocaust denier / Deborah E. Lipstadt. 1st Harper Perennial ed. New York : Harper Perennial, 2006. This chronicle of the author's five-year legal battle with writer David Irving, a prolific supporter of Holocaust denial, describes how the author and a team of experts defended against Irving's libel suit while exposing his distortions of history.
  • The Holocaust conspiracy : an international policy of genocide  / by William R. Perl. New York : Shapolsky Publishers, c1989. By combining existing research with previously unknown findings, Dr Perl draws the inescapable conclusion that it was not apathetic inaction of the worlds powers that made the Holocaust and the Final Solution so tragically ineffective. [The book] sheds shocking new light on the plots and discreet actions of world powers to effectively support the Nazi genocide programs.
  • Holocaust survivor : Mike Jacobs' triumph over tragedy : a memoir / Mike Jacobs ; edited by Ginger Jacobs. 1st ed. Austin,TX : Eakin Press, 2001. It was Rosh Hashanah 1939 when the Nazis invaded Konin, Poland and marched into Mendel Jakubowicz’s (now Mike Jacobs) synagogue. On that day, everything that Mendel had known, loved and considered precious had disappeared. Just a teenager at the time, Mike credits hope, belief and positive thinking for keeping him alive through those five and a half years. MikeJacobs lives in Dallas and is available for speaking engagements. 
  • Tomorrow will be better : surviving Nazi Germany / Walter Meyer ; with the editorial assistance of Matt Valentine. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, c1999. How does a young German who has been a member of the Hitler Youth and has competed in Nazi-organized athletic competitions become, over the span of two years, an 80-lb, tuberculosis-stricken concentration camp escapee? In this memoir, Walter Meyer leads readers from one harrowing moment to the next as he recounts his experiences during and after Hitler's reign. His experience as a non-Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps provides an enlightening and varied perspective to the Holocaust dialogue.