Author : Rudolf Ruder
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780990916109
Total Pages : 498 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (161 download)
Book Synopsis The Long Journey to Cleveland by : Rudolf Ruder
Download or read book The Long Journey to Cleveland written by Rudolf Ruder and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1938 in Europe and two vastly different families, separated by a huge religious and cultural chasm await their fates, one with renewed hope, the other with apprehension as World War II and the Holocaust loom ahead. As a nine year old, Marile, a Catholic girl living with her family in Muhldorf, Germany presented Adolf Hitler with a bouquet of flowers, spent eight years in the Hitler Youth and later miraculously survived an Allied bombing attack. Her father, a train engineer transported strings of cattle cars crammed with unlucky Jews to concentration camps. Several of her uncles served in the Wehrmacht, the German Army, their units attacking Poland in 1939 and later Russia in 1941. One of her uncles was a member of the elite First Mountain Division that captured the city of Lvov, Poland twice. Lvov, renamed Lemberg in 1941 by the Germans was, ironically, home to the second family. Simon, a successful Jewish owner of a tailor shop on a main street of Lvov was married with two children. Their lives were forever changed in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Shortly after the capture of Lvov, the Germans handed over portions of Poland to the Russians in accordance to a previous agreement and Simon and hundreds of thousands of other Jews found themselves under Soviet rule. While Hitler's henchmen began the systematic oppression of Polish Jews in the so-called General Government part of captured Poland, Lvov remained under Soviet rule until 1941 when Germany attacked Russia. As the Russians evacuated Lvov, they murdered thousands of prisoners in the three prisons in Lvov. Simon was captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the notorious Loncki Prison and forced to make SS uniforms. That began his hellish journey through the Third Reich, which would later include time in the Plaszow concentration camp, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and several Dachau camps until finally, near death, being liberated by the Americans. The story unearths hidden connections between the two families and the improbable events that led to a fateful Marile and Simon meeting. The story is complimented by a wealth of photographs, copies of captured Nazi documents and declassified US Army Air Force mission documents.
