Books
What happens when you lose your freedom and the people who eventually get it back for you are no longer alive to thank?
Set during the horrors of World War II, Remember Us opens in Limburg, a small, rural province at the southern tip of the Netherlands. In the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1940, Hitler’s forces rolled through the city, shattering more than 100 years of peace in the Netherlands. The country fell one week later. The Dutch lived under German occupation for four-and-a-half years, until September 1944, when American forces reached Limburg, the last Western province liberated before the Allied advance was slammed to a halt by Nazi Germany.
Remember Us is a true ensemble piece: it follows its seven main characters over a six-year span, zeroing in on women such as Frieda van Schäik, a fifteen-year-old from a small village in the southern Netherlands who watched the German tanks roll past on the first day of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg of Western Europe; and 1st Sergeant Jeff Wiggins of the 960th Quartermaster Company, a segregated Black unit, who escaped the poverty and racism of Alabama (including the local Klan coming with torches to lynch his father) by lying about his age and enlisting at seventeen, and whose assignment is another indignity in a lifetime of indignities—digging graves.
This story, rich with drama and suspense, shows us how this terrible war continues to affect us today, and reminds us of the power and vital necessity of true service in the midst of terror and loss. Remember Us is exactly the book we all need—a reminder that humanity knows no national or racial boundaries, and that our greatest acts are not those we do for ourselves, but for each other.
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When Hitler’s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of mankind’s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis could now plunder the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire.
On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower empowered a new kind of soldier to protect these historic riches. In May 1944 two unlikely American heroes—artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt—embarked from Naples on the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli.
With the German army retreating up the Italian peninsula, orders came from the highest levels of the Nazi government to transport truckloads of art north across the border into the Reich. Standing in the way was General Karl Wolff, a top-level Nazi officer. As German forces blew up the magnificent bridges of Florence, General Wolff commandeered the great collections of the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, later risking his life to negotiate a secret Nazi surrender with American spymaster Allen Dulles.
The Monuments Men were a group of men and women from thirteen nations, most of whom volunteered for service in the newly created Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, or MFAA. Most had expertise as museum directors, curators, art scholars and educators, artists, architects, and archivists. Their job description was simple: to save as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.
These men not only had the vision to understand the grave threat to the greatest cultural and artistic achievements of civilization, but then joined the front lines to do something about it.
The Monuments Men had a mandate from President Roosevelt and the support of General Eisenhower, but no vehicles, gasoline, typewriters, or authority.
In a race against time to save the world’s greatest cultural treasures from destruction at the hands of Nazi fanatics, each man gathered scraps and hints to construct his own treasure map using records recovered from bombed cathedrals and museums, the secret notes and journals of Rose Valland, a French museum employee who secretly tracked Nazi plunder through the rail yards of Paris, and even a tip from a dentist during a root canal.
These unlikely heroes, mostly middle-aged family men, walked away from successful careers into the epicenter of the war, risking—and some losing—their lives. Like other members of the Greatest Generation, they embodied the courageous spirit that enabled the best of humanity to defeat the worst.
“The story is both engaging and inspiring.” – Publishers Weekly
Rescuing Da Vinci uses 460 photographs to tell the "untold story of the 'Monuments Men'" and their discovery of more than 1,000 repositories filled with millions of items including paintings, sculptures, furniture, archives and other treasures stolen during WWII by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
"Rescuing Da Vinci …gathers together, for the first time, nearly 500 photos documenting the Nazi theft of tens of thousands of artworks from European museums and private collections. And it details the immense, painstaking, though little-recognized, efforts of Allied armies to recover and return these precious items." - The Chicago Tribune
Contributor
As the most destructive war in history ravaged Europe, many of the world's most cherished cultural objects were in harm's way. The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History recounts the astonishing true story of 11 men and one woman who risked their lives amidst the bloodshed of World War II to preserve churches, libraries, monuments, and works of art that for centuries defined the heritage of Western civilization.
As the war raged, these American and British volunteers -- museum curators, art scholars and educators, architects, archivists, and artists, known as the Monuments Men -- found themselves in a desperate race against time to locate and save the many priceless treasures and works of art stolen by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Monuments Woman Rose Valland, one of the greatest heroines of the arts, risked her life during World War II working under the watchful eyes of the Nazis. Her remarkable story is told in her memoir Le front de l'art: Défense des collections françaises 1939–1945, a book that sheds light on one of the darkest periods in human history. The Art Front is the first-ever English translation of Valland’s own words and brings her courageous deeds to readers worldwide.
Introduction by Robert M. Edsel.
A must for students, art historians, curators and other scholars, this carefully documented volume is critical to the clarification of provenances of the objects featured and brings to light pictures whose histories and whereabouts have been hidden for decades.
Based on seven years of exhaustive research by leading art historian and curator Nancy Yeide of the National Gallery of Art, this book draws on inventories, correspondence, memoranda, and post-war investigations by both the Allies and the German government to provide the most complete picture ever created of Goering’s art collection.
Rose Valland is one of the greatest and yet unknown heroines of World War II. After risking her life spying on the Nazis, day after day for four long years, Rose lived to fulfill her destiny: locating and returning tens of thousands of works of art stolen by the Nazis during their occupation of France. Yet her remarkable story, like much of her personal life, has remained unknown to the broad public… until now.