Wars & Military Hist

In the summer of 1942, twenty-two year-old Franci Rabinek--designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws--arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labor camps in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. After liberation by the British in April 1945, she finally returned to Prague.

Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele at an Auschwitz selection, saying she was an electrician, an occupation that both endangered and saved her life. In this memoir, she offers her intense, candid, and sometimes funny account of those dark years, with the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends.

Franci's War is the powerful testimony of one incredibly strong young woman who endured the horrors of the Holocaust and survived.

Franci’s War: A Woman’s Story of Survival by Franci Rabinek Epstein

I love non-fiction about strong people who struggle through frightening events and somehow survive. These stories grab me because I want to believe we can persevere throughw ars, famine and pandemics, knowing that survival will take determination and hard work in order to defend our lives and beliefs. Franci’s War: A Woman’s Story of Survival by Franci Rabinek Epstein, is that kind of story. Franci was a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birrkenau camps. Her daughter, Helen Epstein, has edited her mother’s journal and divided it into chapters to help the reader follow the story. 

              Franci was born in Prague, in 1920.  At the age of nineteen she became the owner of her mother’s couture shop, but the Nazi’s had invaded Czechoslovakia and her world was rapidly changing.  Franci and her parents were arrested by the Gestapo, released, she got married, got pregnant—and decided on an abortion--and in the next year, Nazi’s took everything away and sent her to a concentration camp. She survived, in part, because she told them a lie, that she was an electrician. Her story is amazing, honest, heartbreaking and inspiring, and, in my opinion, a must read to understand our past--so we never repeat it.    

Sarah Willis, Loganberry Books

On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable. The book was widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the result was serious revision in both Western and Soviet strategy and doctrine. As a result, both sides were better able to avoid disaster during the Cold War.

The strategic concepts still apply: defense, local animosities, and the usual balance-of-power issues are still very much with us. Kahn's stated purpose in writing this book was simply: "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." By the late 1950s, with both sides H-bomb-armed, reason and time were in short supply.

Kahn, a military analyst at Rand since 1948, understood that a defense based only on thermonuclear arnaments was inconceivable, morally questionable, and not credible.The book was the first to make sense of nuclear weapons. Originally created from a series of lectures, it provides insight into how policymakers consider such issues. One may agree with Kahn or disagree with him on specific issues, but he clearly defined the terrain of the argument. He also looks at other weapons of mass destruction such as biological and chemical, and the history of their use.

Princeton University Press, 1961; 2nd edition with index; dust jacket in protective cover; head of spine chipped; edges shelf worn; rust cloth with black and gilt lettering on spine; binding tight; text clean and bright. G+/G

“When in 1922 T.E. Lawrence enlisted in the ranks of the R.A.F. under the name of John Hulme Ross, he was in a strange physical and mental state as the result of his war experiences. Upon the discovery of his identity he was discharged, but was allowed to re-enlist two and a half years later, this time using the name of Shaw, under which he had meanwhile served in the Tank Corps.

From his notes, many times re-written and revised, he constructed The Mint – ‘an iron, rectangular, abhorrent book,’ he called it, ‘one which no man would willingly read.’ It does not correspond to that description. In the main it is a highly subjective account of Lawrence’s life in the R.A.F. Though resentfully critical of the treatment to which he and other recruits were subjected, it is not self-pitying. It is often robustly entertaining, and the character sketches are brilliant examples of Lawrence’s literary skill. He had an acute ear for conversation: in fact, some of the dialogue so faithfully records habitual barrack-room words that it has been deemed inadvisable to reproduce them in the ordinary edition of the book.” (From book flap)

London: Jonathan Cape, 1955. 1st edition; dust jacket in protective cover; edges tanned; flaps clipped; blue cloth; spine head frayed; corners bumped; binding good; text clean and bright. G/G