The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents
“X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II”
Leah Garrett
Hunter College, City University of New York
Tuesday, February 4
5:00pm
Memorial Union, Old Madison Room
This talk will also be livestreamed via Zoom. To receive the Zoom link, register here.
June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top-secret unit becomes known as X Troop.
Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. In a talk based on her recently published book X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two, Garrett tells the astonishing story of these secret Jewish shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.
Leah Garrett is the Larry A. and Klara Silverstein Chair and Director of Jewish Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Garrett’s most recent book, X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two (Harper Collin US and Penguin, UK), has been featured on CNN, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, CSPAN, and a range of other venues. The book was a bestseller in the UK and has been translated into multiple languages. Her fourth book, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, won the 2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for modern Jewish history and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Garrett is currently working on a new book entitled The Angels of Iwo Jima: The Untold Story of the American Combat Nurses in the Final Battles of World War Two.
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