The story of a Czechoslovakian Jew, Heda Kovaly, who was sent to Auschwitz during World War II. She escaped the death camp and made her way back to Prague. But the horrors did not end with the war--her husband became a victim of the Stalinist purges.

Under a cruel star: A life in Prague 1941-1968

Biographies & Memoirs

Kovály, Heda

Community & Culture

Plunkett Lake Press

Looking Back is the unusual memoir of a Holocaust survivor and physician who became prominent in American psychoanalysis and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement. “Paul Ornstein's remarkable life has taken him from a cheder in a Hungarian town, to the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary through the Holocaust, to the summit of his psychoanalytic profession. This memoir tells this story in vivid and often moving fashion, including his dazed, postwar search for surviving family members, the tenderness of his romance and reunion with his beloved wife and collaborator Anna, their improbable postwar study of medicine among former Nazis at Heidelberg, his use of hypnosis to cure a paralyzed aide to a legendary congressman, to his development, along with Anna, into a towering figure in self-psychology. Paul, who has been fortunate to have Helen Epstein as his co-author, enriches the book by using his penetrating insight to analyze his own motivations and foibles, and those of colleagues and teachers. The reader comes away astonished by how Paul was able to transcend trauma and retain a spirited delight in living and a lifelong sense of optimism.” —Joseph Berger, veteran reporter, The New York Times “Paul Ornstein describes his remarkable and moving personal, historical and professional life journey, losing many family members, his community, and his country in the Shoah, yet being blessed from the beginning with a resilient optimism and clear-eyed certainty about what he can accomplish and who and what matters to him... Looking Back... could be called ‘My Father’s Culture’. It serves as companion volume to his beloved Anna’s My Mother’s Eyes.” — Dr. Nancy J. Chodorow, Author, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality “Paul Ornstein was one of the psychoanalysts who came to the U.S. from Europe after the second world war and became a central figure in American psychoanalysis. He and his wife Anna have made an essential contribution to establishing Heinz Kohut’s self psychology as an important part of our pluralistic psychoanalytic world. The book is a portrait of a fine psychoanalyst and a fine human being.” — Dr. Arnold Richards, Editor InternationalPsychoanalysis.net “Dr. Ornstein’s story is unique and, fluently written with journalist Helen Epstein, provides a way for mental health professionals and lay people alike to learn how one can overcome apocalyptic trauma... Dr. Ornstein’s story demonstrates how determination, perseverance and love can conquer all.” — Dr. Eva Fogelman, author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust “Looking Back is, like its author, direct, without frills, but leaves the reader thinking about some of the Big Questions. And like the story of Passover, Paul Ornstein's story is one that demands telling and retelling.” — Lester Lenoff, MSW, LCSW, Consulting Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry “As a survivor, Paul Ornstein is a model of resilience, turning his Shoah experience into a lesson in living. As a psychoanalyst, he was able to distance himself from ‘ego psychology’ and to acknowledge, under the influence of Kohut, the clinical importance of empathy... an important book, both moving and intellectually challenging.” — Dr. Rachel Rosenblum, Paris Psychoanalytic Society “This memoir conveys one man's experience of the Holocaust and how he was able to reconstruct a life after the war. Uniquely, it also gives us a feel for what was a seismic event in analytic circles in the 20th century, the birth and growth of Self Psychology.” —Dr. Michael Rosenbluth, FRCPC Chief, Department of Psychiatry, Toronto East General Hospital “This memoir is a gem, rich and deeply personal as well as a chronicle of a remarkable life lived during a remarkable time. And those photos! They are stunning.” — Dr. James Fisch, Editorial Board, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology

Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst

Epstein, Helen

Ornstein, Paul

Professionals & Academics

Account Rendered was first published in Germany in 1963 as Fazit: Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch or Account Rendered: No attempt at justification. Maschmann wrote to Hannah Arendt that her intent in writing this memoir was to help her former Nazi colleagues think about their actions, and to help others “better understand” why people like her had been drawn to Hitler. Written as a letter to an unnamed Jewish girl, this memoir details the trajectory of a socially-conscious, well-educated, middle-class girl as she joins the Hitler Youth, supervises the eviction of Polish farmers from their land and works in the high echelons of Nazi press and propaganda. Arrested in 1945 at the age of 33, Maschmann completed mandatory de-Nazification and became a freelance journalist. This edition includes a new introduction explaining how the Publishers identified Maschmann’s high school Jewish friend, Marianne Schweitzer Burkenroad, born in 1918 and located her in California. In an afterword, she recounts for the first time her friendship with Maschmann and her reactions to Account Rendered.
“[Account Rendered is an] important document of its time [...] I have the impression that you are totally sincere, otherwise I wouldn’t have written back to you.” — letter from Hannah Arendt to Melita Maschmann
“[A] soul-searching record in which [Melita Maschmann] attempts to state and understand her guilt as a Nazi... her account here is intelligent and convincing.” — Kirkus Reviews
“There weren’t a lot of books by former Nazis in the Sixties. I found in [Account Rendered] someone who had been overtaken by history, was struggling to make sense of what no longer made sense, and to understand why it had once done so. In other books, the Jews were an abstraction. For Maschmann, the Jews were neighbors and friends, which complicated the process of dehumanization that she participated in. The memoir seemed believable and honest in ways that other testimonies from the defeated did not.” — Arthur Samuelson, former Editor-in-Chief, Schocken Books
“Melita Maschmann’s candid [book], sub-titled ‘No attempt at justification,’ is a valuable study of the political seduction of youthful zeal” — Der Spiegel

Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self

Politics & Social Sciences

Maschmann, Melita

Burkenroad, Marianne Schweitzer

Politics & Government

In 1933, when she is ten, Berliner Inge Deutschkron learns that she is a Jew. At first her family is at greater risk for their leftist politics than because they are Jews. Her father flees to England; Inge and her mother hide in plain sight as non-Jews, dependent on the underground network for their survival, in constant danger of discovery or betrayal. Otto Weidt employed Inge in the office of his workshop for the blind. Toward the end of the war, Inge and her mother manage to leave Berlin, and eventually emigrate to England. Inge Deutschkron became an Israeli citizen and an editor of Maariv. “One of the greatest successes of German memoir literature” — Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine “... invaluable as testimony of the war years of one of Berlin’s 12,000 surviving Jews.” — Kirkus Reviews “[A] simple and charming memoir by a Jewish woman of how she survived as a girl in her late teens in wartime Berlin... Unsentimental, resilient and aware that luck can make all the difference, Inge Deutschkron... has remained a true Berliner.” — István Deák, The New York Review of Books

Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin

Deutschkron, Inge

Memoirs

This intrepid memoir tracks sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the life of a veteran American journalist. It also describes the long and ultimately successful psychotherapy the author undertook to heal. The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma “invents its own genre,” wrote Sherry Turkle. “The author suspects sexual abuse in her childhood and investigates with the toolkits of an historian and ethnographer.” The result is a memoir that is what Eva Hoffman calls, “a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self.”
This memoir is the third of a non-fiction trilogy, following Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Putnam, 1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (Little, Brown, 1997), both widely translated. As Gloria Steinem wrote, “In Epstein’s hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction but more magnetic.”
“Clear-eyed, fearless, taboo-breaking... This trilogy is unusual not only because nearly 40 years separate the first and last volumes — with the second positioned midway at the 20-year mark — but also because the works differ so greatly in style, structure, and content... The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma’s major contribution is its willingness to talk openly and place forefront a personal trauma of sexual abuse in its post-Holocaust context... Helen Epstein has consistently rejected sanitizing Jewish history — including women’s history... She has refused to keep secrets that she knew needed to be told and she has avoided idealization, nostalgia, and hagiography.” — Irena Klepfisz, Tablet Magazine
“Epstein takes the reader through her decades-long process of self-discovery, understanding and healing accomplished through a strong bond of friendship, a solid and supportive family, and the powerfully restorative effects of psychoanalysis... written with page-turning clarity, openness and complete honesty... This is a ground-breaking memoir in style and in its contribution to the issues of sexual abuse.” — Berkshire Eagle
"In this poignant, vividly written and fearlessly frank memoir, Helen Epstein probes, with sensitivity and insight, the multi-layered ambiguities of love, intimate relationships, and post-Holocaust American lives. More than a chronicle of events, this is a true labor of memory, in which the story of the body is inseparable from the narrative of the self.” — Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
“In midlife, well settled in marriage and motherhood, Epstein is impelled to revisit the legacy of her childhood. As she risks both her own sanity and the relationships she holds most dear, Epstein illustrates the complex moral and psychological effects of trauma, and the gritty process of recovery.” — Judith Herman, M.D., author of Trauma and Recovery
“This is heroic writing, and belongs in the canon of accounts of mothers and daughters, of wounds lost in the depth of childhood, and the valiant determination of a woman to live in uncertainty with grace.” — Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories
“In this riveting book, Helen Epstein probes the dark corners of her childhood with sensitivity and remarkable candor. This memoir reads like a detective story and asks questions that affect us all: how does our sexual nature get formed or deformed, and how can it change? Unflinching writing.” — Anne Karpf, author of The War After: Living with the Holocaust
“Courageously peeling back layers of her own psyche, Helen Epstein describes how one is able to withstand and survive trauma, and perhaps even more difficult to heal from it... Epstein offers a riveting cultural history of America in the late twentieth century.” — Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence

The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

This daughter's profile of Czechoslovak swimmer and water polo player Kurt Epstein (1904-1975) traces the history of Jewish athletes in Central Europe and provides a case study of one such life-long athlete. Epstein grew up a stone's throw from the Elbe River and began swimming before the First World War, when his town of Roudnice nad Labem was still part of Austria-Hungary. In high school, he became a competitive rower and swimmer, challenging prevailing stereotypes about Jews and becoming a leading Czechoslovak water polo player and swimming coach, representing his country at two Olympic Games, in 1928 and 1936. In addition to describing the cultural background of the Epstein family in the Bohemian countryside, the book examines Kurt Epstein's decision to participate in the 1936 Berlin "Nazi" Olympics, and follows him through a series of Nazi concentration camps back to Prague, where he was elected member of the Czechoslovak National Olympic Committee. After the Communist putsch of 1948, Epstein vowed to flee "in a swimsuit if necessary" and, at 44, emigrated to New York City where he became a cutter in the garment district, swam weekly at the St. George pool in Brooklyn, and served as Treasurer of The Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World.

A Jewish Athlete: Swimming Against Stereotype in 20th Century Europe

In this memoir, Kathryn Hulme, a United Nations relief officer in Bavaria from 1945 until 1951, records the daily life, hopes and struggles of over 100,000 Displaced Persons housed by UNRRA at Wildflecken, a former training camp for Nazi SS troops, and in other DP camps."[A]n unforgettable report on the struggle, the plight, the defeat or the eventual redemption of countless victims of the time." - George Shuster, The New York Times"A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ghastly twentieth-century invention, the displaced person." - The New Yorker"The Wild Place is a rare book - powerful and exciting, compassionate and disturbing, tragic and funny - drawn from great and strange material. It is a verbatim record of the most dramatic human debris of our time, the homeless hordes left on deposit in Germany." - The New Yorker"Miss Hulme's story will seize your imagination, keep you fascinated, rouse your compassion, admiration, and respect... The top book of American nonfiction published this year..." - San Francisco Chronicle"A beautiful book, heartbreaking and at the same time veined with humor. It projects the passionate sense of purpose experienced by a compassionate woman struggling desperately to salvage human lives, and it leaves us with a quickened awareness of the astounding tenacity of the human spirit, the astounding durability of hope." - The Atlantic Monthly"A sensitive and moving report, by an UNRRA field worker, of her five years' experience in European D.P. camps after the war." - Henry L. Roberts, Foreign Affairs"A deeply felt and deeply moving record of this whole tragedy of displacement and dispossession, this is certain to engage the heart of any reader who has one." - Kirkus Reviews"Little has been recorded of the heroic postwar work with masses of displaced persons, and it will be hard to find a better account than this. It is crowded with people and incidents and has a special vitality as well as the ring of truth. Highly recommended." - Library Journal

The Wild Place

Hulme, Kathryn

Historical

In a career that paralleled the emergence of the United States as an international power, Marshall was a participant in every significant event contributing to the nation's status as a superpower. From his first combat duty in the Philippines at the turn of the century, through both World Wars, into the cold war and the Korean conflict, Marshall was a key figure in devising and implementing US military strategies and foreign policies. Stoler emphasizes the years 1939-1951, when Marshall served as World War II army chief of staff, special presidential representative to China, secretary of state at the beginning of the cold war and Korean War secretary of defense. The book is unique in its merging of military and diplomatic history with biography. It includes a chronology and a bibliographic essay.

George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century

Stoler, Mark A.

Leaders & Notable People

Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search For Her Mother's History

Getting Through It: My Year of Cancer During Covid

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Plunkett Lake Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Plunkett Lake Press