Showing results for "The Four" in History

The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz tells the stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly linked by everyday garments, revealing how the ordinary can connect us in extraordinary ways. Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker...

When Nazi occupiers arrived in Greece in 1941, it was the beginning of a horror that would reverberate through generations. In the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki), almost 50,000 Jews were sent to Nazi concentration camps during the war, and only 2,000 returned. A Jewish doctor named Isaac Matarasso and his son escaped imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Nazis and joined the resistance. After the city’s liberation they returned to rebuild Salonica and, along with the other survivors, to grapple with the near-total destruction of their community.

The title itself represents the mysteries of the origins of the Jewish People, their endurance, and their unique place in the history of humankind. The book opens with a reflection on the nature of humans, and how story telling is both intrinsic to and essential for our species; and what follows is how the Jews formed as a people, were first identified archeologically as such in the monuments of Egyptian pharaohs, and how they cohered tightly by telling their story from generation to generation.