Lives Reclaimed

Reviews / Votes

Detailed, well-written account... He tells the story with an attention to detail and a sympathy for individual weaknesses and vicissitudes that makes it all the more insightful... Mark Roseman has succeeded in clarifying just why resistence and rescue were so hard and why recognition has been so faltering and tardy. * Mary Fulbrook, The Times Literary Supplement * Mark Roseman tells the story well, and asks important questions: about his subjects and our own entanglement in evil today. * The Church Times * Fascinating study ... Roseman's book is a brilliant, humane, and timely study. It brings both individual Bundists and also a whole period vividly to life. * Alun David, The Jewish Chronicle * Mark Roseman's Lives Reclaimed is a landmark book in the history of Holocaust rescue for several reasons: it illuminates a virtually unknown group of quirky utopian socialists who transformed themselves into a network of German rescuers, its source base is composed primarily of rare contemporary documents and only secondarily of post-war accounts, and it is a story brilliantly researched and exceptionally well-told. * Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland * Humanity is fleeting and unpredictable, but it can be rendered, with patience and skill, into history, and thereby become exemplary. This is what Mark Roseman has done, and his readers will be grateful. * Timothy D. Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin * Compelling reading. We have come to think of tales of rescue from Nazi persecution as being about extraordinary individuals. Mark Roseman brings us a very different kind of story-of a small and deeply interconnected group of ethical socialists in Germany who supported each other and the Jews they hid. By showing how the dynamics within small groups can make an enormous difference, Roseman also opens new perspectives on the writing of history. * Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War: A Nation under Arms * In this remarkable reconstruction of a hitherto unknown resistance group, Mark Roseman tells the gripping story of ordinary Germans who did their utmost to assist Jews and dissidents targeted by the Nazi regime. Motivated by ethical principles and believing they could change society for the better, their story serves as a model of moral political conduct for our own turbulent era. * Susannah Heschel, author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus * Once again, Roseman has written a pioneering work that changes our vision of life under the Hitler dictatorship. * V.R. Berghahn, author of Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer * Captivating. This is a book for our turbulent times: a story of compassion and resistance and a call to courage and solidarity. * Johanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History * Roseman is the first historian to tell the story of the Bund, a communitarian group whose ethical radar remained intact during the Nazi era. Insightful, engagingly written, and scrupulously researched, this important book illuminates both the terror that a small, disproportionately female opposition group faced and its success in saving lives. * Marion Kaplan, author of Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany *