On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women, many of them teenagers, boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service and left their parents’ homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Instead, the young women were sent to Auschwitz. Only a few would survive.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 MACADAM
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 BUE
Praised as “remarkable,” “meticulous,” and “long overdue,” Anne Frank: The Biography, originally published in 1998, still stands as the definitive account of the girl who has become “the human face of the Holocaust.” For this nuanced portrait of her famous subject, biographer Melissa Müller drew on exclusive interviews with family and friends as well as on previously unavailable correspondence, even, in the process, discovering five missing diary pages. Full of revelations, Müller’s richly textured narrative returned Anne Frank to history, portraying the flesh-and-blood girl unsentimentalized and so all the more affecting.
CALL NUMBER: B FRANK, ANNE
At the terrible heart of the modern age lies Auschwitz. In a total inversion of earlier hopes about the use of science and technology to improve, extend, and protect human life, Auschwitz manipulated the same systems to quite different ends.
In Sybille Steinbacher’s terse, powerful new book, the reader is led through the process by which something unthinkable to anyone on earth in the 1930s had become a sprawling, industrial reality during the course of the Second World War. How Auschwitz grew and mutated into an entire dreadful city, how both those who managed it and those who were killed by it came to be in Poland in the 1940s, and how it was allowed to happen, is something everyone needs to understand.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 STE
At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp?mainly Jewish women and girls were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop called the Upper Tailoring Studio was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 ADLINGTON
Tells the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba, a brilliant, yet troubled young man who became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 FREEDLAND
Poland, 1944. The train slowed and halted with a squeal of the brakes. It felt like we waited in the carriage for an eternity, but eventually, the heavy doors opened, directly into the chaos outside.
Sara Leibovits, a 16-year-old Jewish girl, was a passenger on the train, together with her family. Within minutes, their horrific fate was sealed.
The little family spent its final minutes together on the platform at Auschwitz, before its members were ordered in all directions and each left to their own fate. Her mother and baby brothers were sent to their deaths. Her father was made a Sonderkommando, one of the men forced to remove the bodies from the gas chambers, and was later executed.
This is the powerful true story of Sara Leibovits and the incredible pain and hardships she went through. Yet despite the horrors she faced she always tried to maintain her families’ values of courage, faith and kindness to others. Her story is intertwined with that of her daughter, Eti, seventy years later, who embodies the voice of the second generation and completes the Holocaust survivors’ tale.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 LEIBOVITS
May 1945. In the aftermath of the Second Word War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. As Kommandant of Auschwitz, Höss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children; he was the man who perfected Hitler’s program of mass extermination. Höss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 HARDING
Solomon Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’ exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated.
CALL NUMBER: 741.5 BRAGER
In 1985, six-year old Betina Anton watched Brazilian authorities apprehend her kindergarten teacher for allegedly using documents to bury in secrecy the remains of Josef Mengele, known worldwide for cruel human experiments and for sending thousands to the Auschwitz gas chambers. Decades later, as an experienced journalist disturbed by the mysteries surrounding the departure of Austrian expat Liselotte Bossert, Anton set out to find her and see if the rumors were true. She could not imagine how deeply into Mengele’s life-on-the-run her investigation would take her.
CALL NUMBER: 341.69 ANTON
A revelatory new history that reexamines the brutal reality of the Holocaust-and reinterprets the events as a living trauma from which modern society has not yet recovered.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 STONE
A historical investigation and family memoir intertwines the narrative of Anne Frank with the untold story of Bep Voskuijl, her protector and closest confidante in the Annex, who risked her life to protect the Franks and formed a deep friendship with Anne.
CALL NUMBER: 940.53 WIJK VOSKUIJL
Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia were captivated by each other from the moment they first exchanged glances across the work floor. It was the beginning of a love story that could have happened anywhere. Except for one difference: this romance was unfolding in history’s most notorious death camp, between two young prisoners whose budding intimacy risked dooming them if they were caught.
CALL NUMBER: 940.54 BLANKFELD
In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable pair enjoyed a carefree childhood of games, sleepovers, and treats with the other children in their neighborhood of Rivierenbuurt. But in 1942, Hannah and Anne’s lives abruptly changed forever. As the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam progressed, Anne and the Frank family seemingly vanished, leaving behind unmade beds and dishes in the sink–but no trace of Anne’s precious diary. Torn from her dear friend without warning, Hannah spent the next two years tormented by questions about Anne’s fate, wondering if she had, by some miracle, managed to escape danger.
CALL NUMBER: B PICK GOSLAR, HANNAH
In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young women were deported as some of the first Jews to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in charge of the day-to-day accommodation blocks, they could deflect attention away from themselves. Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and put in charge of hundreds of women in the notorious Experimental Block 10. She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: saving lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS and risking execution. Through her inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers.
CALL NUMBER: B HELLINGER, MAGDA
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 FOGARTY
On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air.
Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.
CALL NUMBER: B SZPILMAN, WLADYSLAW
When her father died, singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion inherited a piano she knew had been in her family for over a hundred years. But it is only when she finds a cassette recording of her grandfather, Stephen, playing one of his compositions, that the true and almost unbelievable history of the piano, this man, and her family begins to unravel.
Stephen was a man who enjoyed great fame, a man who suffered the horrors of concentration camps in WWII, a man who ultimately survives–along with his piano. By piecing together his cassette recordings, unpublished memoirs, letters, and documents, Roxanne sings out her grandfather’s story of music and hope, lost and found, and explores the power of what can echo down through generations.
CALL NUMBER: B DE BASTION, STEPHEN
After more than seventy years in obscurity, the diary of a teenage girl during the Holocaust has been revealed for the first time. Rywka’s Diary is at once an astonishing historical document and a moving tribute to the many ordinary people whose lives were forever altered by the Holocaust. At its heart, it is the diary of a girl named Rywka Lipszyc who detailed the brutal conditions that Jews in the Lodz ghetto, the second largest in Poland, endured under the Nazis: poverty, hunger and malnutrition, religious oppression, and, in Rywka’s case, the death of her parents and siblings.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 LIPSZYC
In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments.
Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists. Lise fled to Sweden, where she made a groundbreaking discovery in nuclear physics, and the others fled to the United States, where they brought advanced physics to American universities. No matter their destination, each woman revolutionized the field of physics when all odds were stacked against them, galvanizing young women to do the same.
CALL NUMBER: 305.6 CAMPBELL BES
The real-life puzzle of what happened to the generation of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in hiding, Edgar Award-winning mystery novelist R. D. Rosen tells this silent, forgotten generation’s story through the lives of three girls hidden in three different countries–among the less than 10 percent of Jewish children in Europe to survive World War II–who went on to lead remarkable lives in New York City.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 ROSEN
The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that readers haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom–a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.
CALL NUMBER: 940.53 LOFTIS
Sixty year-old Doriel Waldman, a Polish Jew born in 1936, is on the verge of insanity until Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt draws him out with his story of surviving the Holocaust in hiding with his father while his mother made a reputation for herself in the Polish resistance–only to die in an accident shortly after the war.
CALL NUMBER: FIC WIE
Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family who place him into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. In 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, Teddy is re-assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam to replace fleeing staff.
Teddy’s job is to process visa applications, and by 1939, refugees from Nazi-conquered Poland, Austria, and other countries are desperate to secure safe passage to America. As Hitler sweeps through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Holland, the screws tighten and law after virulent law is passed to threaten the lives, indeed the very existence of the Jewish people. When Teddy and his girlfriend Sara are introduced to an orphaned young girl named Katy, who has been abandoned on the grounds of a nursery school, they agree to adopt her. Teddy comes to realize that he holds the key to saving lives, whether five, fifty, or five hundred–and makes the dangerous and selfless decision to join with underground groups and use his position at the Consulate to rescue those with no other avenue of escape.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BALSON
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
CALL NUMBER: FIC DOERR
1942. Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany after her fiancé was killed in a pogrom. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily, who lives with her family in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind.
Seeking help, Hannah joins the Sapphire Line, a secret resistance network led by a mysterious woman named Micheline and her enigmatic brother Matteo. But when a grave mistake causes Lily’s family to be arrested and slated for deportation to Auschwitz, Hannah finds herself torn between her loyalties. How much is Hannah willing to sacrifice to save the people she loves?
CALL NUMBER: FIC JENOFF
1960, New York City: College student Rita Klein is a pioneering woman in the new field of computer programming–until she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. At the Hudson Home for Unwed Mothers, social workers pressure her into surrendering her baby for adoption. Rita is struggling to get on with her life when she meets Jacob Nassy, a charming yet troubled man from the Netherlands who is traumatized by his childhood experience of being separated from his mother during the Holocaust. When Rita learns that Hitler’s Final Solution was organized using Hollerith punch-card computers, she sets out to find the answers that will help Jacob heal.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ALKEMADE
Young schoolteacher Andrée Geulen secretly defies the Nazis in Belgium, who are forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. Andrée is not Jewish, but she feels a maternal connection to her students, who are living in constant fear, and decides to take action. No child should have to suffer under such persecution. But what can one woman do against an entire army?
CALL NUMBER: FIC CONNOLLY
A collection of inspiring profiles pay tribute to the incredible deeds of the Righteous Among the Nations, little-known heroes who saved countless lives during the Holocaust.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 HUROWITZ
On a September day in Manhattan in 1939, twenty-something Caroline Ferriday is consumed by her efforts to secure the perfect boutonniere for an important French diplomat and resisting the romantic advances of a married actor. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish Catholic teenager, is nervously anticipating the changes that are sure to come since Germany has declared war on Poland. As tensions rise abroad – and in her personal life – Caroline’s interest in aiding the war effort in France grows and she eventually comes to hear about the dire situation at the Ravensbruck all-female concentration camp. At the same time, Kasia’s carefree youth is quickly slipping away, only to be replaced by a fervor for the Polish resistance movement. Through Ravensbruck – and the horrific atrocities taking place there told in part by an infamous German surgeon, Herta Oberheuser – the two women’s lives will converge in unprecedented ways and a novel of redemption and hope emerges that is breathtaking in scope and depth.
CALL NUMBER: FIC KELLY
In the spring of 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank has just come to the silver screen to great acclaim, and a young woman named Margie Franklin is working in Philadelphia as a secretary at a Jewish law firm. On the surface she lives a quiet life, but Margie has a secret: a past and a religion she has denied, and a family and a country she left behind. She is really Margot Frank, older sister of Anne, who did not die in Bergen-Belsen as reported, but who instead escaped to America. But now, as her sister becomes a global icon, Margie’s carefully constructed life begins to fall apart.
CALL NUMBER: FIC CANTOR
Elliot Rosenzweig, a respected civic leader and wealthy philanthropist, is attending a fundraiser when he is suddenly accosted and accused of being a former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser is convinced he is right and engages attorney Catherine Lockhart to bring Rosenzweig to justice. Solomon persuades attorney Catherine Lockhart to take his case, revealing that the true Piatek was abandoned as a child and raised by Solomon’s own family only to betray them during the Nazi occupation. But has Solomon accused the right man?
CALL NUMBER: FIC BALSON
Sophia Alexander, the beautiful daughter of a famous surgeon in Berlin, has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister, Theresa, and look after her father and the household, while also volunteering at his hospital after school. Meanwhile, Hitler’s rise to power and the violence in her very own town have Sophia concerned, but only her mother is willing to share her fears openly.
After tragedy strikes and her mother dies, Sophia becomes increasingly involved in the resistance, attending meetings of dissidents and helping however she can. Circumstances become increasingly dangerous and personal when Sophia assists her sister’s daring escape from Germany, as Theresa flees with her young husband and his family. Her father also begins to resist the regime, secretly healing those hiding from persecution, only to have his hospital burned to the ground. When he is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, Sophia is truly on her own, but more determined than ever to help.
While working as a nurse with the convent nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, Sophia continues her harrowing efforts to transport Jewish children to safety and finds herself under surveillance. As the political tensions rise and the brutal oppression continues, Sophia is undeterred, risking it all, even her own freedom, as she rises to the challenge of helping those in need–no matter the cost.
CALL NUMBER: FIC STEEL
In the winter of 1991, at a concert in Krakow, an older woman with a special violin meets a fellow musician who is instantly captivated by it. When he asks her how she obtained it, she reveals its remarkable story: imprisoned at Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp, Daniel feels his humanity slipping away. Treasured memories become hazier with each passing day. Then Daniel’s former identity as a crafter of fine violins is revealed. The camp’s two most dangerous men use this information to make a cruel wager: If Daniel can build a successful violin within a certain number of days, the Kommandant wins a case of the finest burgundy. If not, the camp doctor, a torturer, gets hold of Daniel.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ANG
The story of a man who took incredible risks and spent his considerable fortune to build a factory camp to protect Jews in World War II Germany.
CALL NUMBER: FIC KEN
First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp…and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.
CALL NUMBER: FIC STY
In this enthralling novel from New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women–a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947–are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.
CALL NUMBER: FIC QUINN
A terrible darkness has fallen upon Jacob Weisz’s beloved Germany. The Nazi regime, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, has surged to power and now hold Germany by the throat. All non-Aryans–especially Jews like Jacob and his family–are treated like dogs.When tragedy strikes during one terrible night of violence, Jacob flees and joins rebel forces working to undermine the regime. But after a raid goes horribly wrong, Jacob finds himself in a living nightmare–trapped in a crowded, stinking car on the train to the Auschwitz death camp.As World War II rages and Hitler begins implementing his “final solution” to systematically and ruthlessly exterminate the Jewish people, Jacob must rely on his wits and a God he’s not sure he believes in to somehow escape from Auschwitz and alert the world to the Nazi’s atrocities before Fascism overtakes all of Europe. The fate of millions hangs in the balance.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ROSENBERG
From the time she was a young girl, Luisa Voekler has loved solving puzzles and cracking codes. Brilliant and logical, she’s expected to quickly climb the career ladder at the CIA. But while her coworkers have moved on to thrilling Cold War assignments–especially in the exhilarating era of the late 1980s–Luisa’s work remains stuck in the past decoding messages from World War II.
Journalist Haris Voekler grew up a proud East Berliner. But as his eyes open to the realities of postwar East Germany, he realizes that the Soviet promises of a better future are not coming to fruition. After the Berlin Wall goes up, Haris finds himself separated from his young daughter and all alone after his wife dies. There’s only one way to reach his family–by sending coded letters to his father-in-law who lives on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
When Luisa Voekler discovers a secret cache of letters written by the father she has long presumed dead, she learns the truth about her grandfather’s work, her father’s identity, and why she has never progressed in her career. With little more than a rudimentary plan and hope, she journeys to Berlin and risks everything to free her father and get him out of East Berlin alive.
As Luisa and Haris take turns telling their stories, events speed toward one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic moments–the fall of the Berlin Wall and that night’s promise of freedom, truth, and reconciliation for those who lived, for twenty-eight years, behind the bleak shadow of the Iron Curtain’s most iconic symbol.
CALL NUMBER: FIC REAY
Escaping from Paris in 1942 after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew, a graduate student finds refuge in a small mountain town, where she forges identity documents to help hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HARMEL
A fictionalized account of the post-war life of Peter, who hid in the secret annex with Anne Frank and her family, follows his survival of the Holocaust, his relocation to America, and his memories upon the publication of Anne’s diary.
CALL NUMBER: FIC FEL
After surviving the brutality of a Nazi prison camp, Marta Nedermann, starting a new life in London with her husband, a British diplomat, once again becomes trapped in a web of intrigue and betrayal when Communists infiltrate British Intelligence and thetraitor is linked to her past.
CALL NUMBER: FIC JENOFF
Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila, choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida–meaning non-birth in Hebrew.
To increase their child’s chance of survival, the Friedmans smuggle the baby out of the ghetto and into the arms of a non-Jewish farm family when Elida is only three months old. It is the beginning of a life marked by constant upheaval. When the Nazis raze the entire Kovno Ghetto, Jonah and Tzila are among those killed. Their only child is left orphaned and alone, dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Despite her circumstances, Elida grows up, changing families, countries, continents, and even names, countless times. Surviving the war and the Holocaust that stole her parents, the young woman never gives up hope. In her lifelong pursuit to find love and belonging, she works to rebuild her identity and triumph over her terrible circumstances.
A moving, powerful chronicle of overcoming impossible odds, The Forbidden Daughter is the true story of one unforgettable woman and her will to survive.
CALL NUMBER: FIC KLEIN JAKOB
The New York Times bestselling author of the “heart-stopping tale of survival and heroism” (People) The Book of Lost Names returns with an evocative coming-of-age World War II story about a young woman who uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis-until a secret from her past threatens everything.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HARMEL
Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into Poland. Within days Emma’s husband is forced to disappear underground, leaving her alone in the Jewish ghetto. In the dead of night, the resistance smuggles her out and brings her to Krakow, where she takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile.
Emma’s already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who hires her to work as his assistant. As the atrocities of war intensify, Emma must make unthinkable choices that will force her to risk not only her double life, but also the lives of those she loves.
CALL NUMBER: FIC JEN
From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II.
CALL NUMBER: LP FIC MEISSNER
A trustworthy boy who has never told a lie, 11-year-old Nico Krispis, duped by a German officer into leading his family and fellow Jewish residents to their doom, becomes a pathological liar, in a story that explores honesty, devotion and revenge-and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ALBOM
The New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us creates a vivid portrait of marriage, family, and the haunting grief of World War II in this emotionally charged, beautifully rendered story that spans a generation, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BLUM
Inspired by a heartbreaking true story, this poignant novel tells of one woman’s brave fight for love, life, and hope during a time of unimaginable darkness in WWII Germany, perfect for readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
CALL NUMBER: FIC STUART
An epic love story and family drama set at the dawn of World War II”–Provided by publisher. “Viann and Isabelle have always been close despite their differences. Younger, bolder sister Isabelle lives in Paris while Viann lives a quiet and content life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. When World War II strikes and Antoine is sent off to fight, Viann and Isabelle’s father sends Isabelle to help her older sister cope. As the war progresses, it’s not only the sisters’ relationship that is tested, but also their strength and their individual senses of right and wrong. With life as they know it changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Viann and Isabelle will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HANNAH
Sixteen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier and being forced to give up her baby. She lives above a small rail station, which she cleans in order to earn her keep… When Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp, she is reminded of the child that was taken from her. And in a moment that will change the course of her life, she snatches one of the babies and flees into the snowy night. Noa finds refuge with a German circus, but she must learn the flying trapeze act so she can blend in undetected, spurning the resentment of the lead aerialist, Astrid. At first rivals, Noa and Astrid soon forge a powerful bond. But as the facade that protects them proves increasingly tenuous, Noa and Astrid must decide whether their friendship is enough to save one another–or if the secrets that burn between them will destroy everything.
CALL NUMBER: FIC JENOFF
A gripping historical novel about two mothers who must make unthinkable choices in the face of the Nazi occupation.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HARMEL
As a student in post-war Germany Michael has a clandestine affair with an older woman, Hanna, but breaks up when she refuses to talk about her past. Years later, now a law student, Michael recognizes Hanna as the defendent in a major war crimes trial.
CALL NUMBER: FIC SCH
First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.
CALL NUMBER: FIC TUCK
Joining the elite Bletchley Park codebreaking team during World War II, three women from very different walks of life uncover a spy’s dangerous agenda years later against the backdrop of the royal wedding of Elizabeth and Philip.
CALL NUMBER: FIC QUINN
When a woman stumbles across a mysterious children’s book, long-held secrets about her missing sister and their childhood spent in the English countryside during World War II are revealed.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HENRY
An epic battle for survival begins between man and vampire in The Strain–the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy from one of Hollywood’s most inventive storytellers and a critically acclaimed thriller writer. Guillermo del Toro, the genius director of the Academy Award-winning Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, and Hammett Award-winning author Chuck Hogan have joined forces to boldly reinvent the vampire novel. Brilliant, blood-chilling, and unputdownable, The Strain is a nightmare of the first order.
CALL NUMBER: FIC TOR
In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a T©Þtowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism–but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive. One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.
CALL NUMBER: FIC MORRIS
From the bestselling author of Truths I Never Told You, Before I Let You Go, and the The Warsaw Orphan, Kelly Rimmer’s powerful WWII novel follows a woman’s urgent search for answers to a family mystery that uncovers truths about herself that she never expected.
CALL NUMBER: FIC RIMMER
She possessed a stunning beauty. She also possessed a stunning mind. Could the world handle both?
Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich’s plans while at her husband’s side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.
But she kept a secret more shocking than her heritage or her marriage: she was a scientist. And she knew a few secrets about the enemy. She had an idea that might help the country fight the Nazis…if anyone would listen to her.
A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece.
CALL NUMBER: LP FIC BENEDICT
On a golden August morning in 1939, sisters Antonina and Helena Dąbrowska send their father off to defend Poland against the looming threat of German invasion. The next day, the first bombs fall on Warsaw, decimating their beloved city and shattering the world of their youth.
When Antonina’s beloved Marek is forced behind ghetto walls, along with the rest of Warsaw’s Jewish population, Antonina knows she cannot stand by and soon becomes a key figure in a daring network of women risking their lives to shelter Jewish children. Meanwhile, Helena finds herself drawn into the ranks of Poland’s secret army, joining the fight to free her homeland from occupation.
But the secrets both are forced to keep threaten to tear them apart–and the cost of resistance may prove greater than either ever imagined.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BARRATT
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents in the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous tunnels beneath the city. One day she sees a girl about her own age buying flowers. Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close. As the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds.
CALL NUMBER: FIC JENOFF
The profoundly moving story of a girl who transforms the lives of those around her during World War II, Germany. Although Liesel is illiterate when she is adopted by a German couple, her adoptive father encourages her to learn to read. Ultimately, the power of words helps Liesel and Max, a Jew hiding in the family’s home, escape from the events unfolding around them.
CALL NUMBER: YADVD FIC BOOK
The extraordinary true story of the Bielski brothers who turn a band of war defectors into commanding freedom fighters and motivate hundreds of private citizens to join their fight against the Nazi regime.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC DEFIANCE
When Deborah Lipstadt speaks out against Holocaust denier David Irving over his falsification of history, she discovers that the stakes are higher than ever in the battle for historical truth. Now faced with a libel lawsuit in British court, Lipstadt and her attorney have the heavy burden of proving that the Holocaust actually happened, in a riveting legal fight with stunning consequences.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC DENIAL
A World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy named Jojo whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother is hiding a young Jewish girl in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, Jojo must confront his blind nationalism.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC JOJO
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC JUDGMENT
An unforgettable fable that proves love, family, and imagination conquer all.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC LIFE
The story of the incredible efforts made by British cameramen to film and document the unbelievable atrocities the Allies encountered during the Liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945 at the end of World War II.
CALL NUMBER: DVD 940.5315 NIGHT
Tells the true story of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker, who, along with Trevor Chadwick, and Doreen Warriner of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia, rescued 669 children from the Nazis in the months leading up to World War II. Fifty years later, it’s 1988 and Nicky lives haunted by the fate of the children he wasn’t able to bring to safety in England, always blaming himself for not doing more. It’s not until a live BBC television show, ‘That’s Life!’, surprises him by introducing him to some surviving children, now adults, that he finally begins to come to terms with the guilt and grief he had carried for five decades.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC ONE
Loosely based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who was a brilliant pianist. He watched as his family was shipped off to Nazi labor camps. He managed to escape and lived for years in the ruins of Warsaw, hiding from the Nazis.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC PIANIST
A tragic and shameful moment in French history continues to have consequences in the present day in this screen adaptation of the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American writer living in Paris with her husband, Bertrand (Frédéric Pierrot), an architect who is restoring a block of apartments in Paris owned by his family. Julia learns that Bertrand’s family obtained the building through less than honorable means; the original owners were Jews who were forced to sell in the wake of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in 1942, when the Nazi-affiliated Vichy government arrested over 13,000 Parisian Jews. One of the victims was Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance), a ten-year-old girl who tried to protect her younger brother by locking him in a cupboard in their apartment. Fearing for her brother’s safety, Sarah escapes the crowded cycling stadium where the Jews are being held and tries to make her way back home. Julia learns of Sarah’s story while doing research on the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, and her investigation teaches her a great deal about an event many in France are reluctant to discuss, as well as the links to Bertrand’s family.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC SARAHS
The story of a man who took incredible risks and spent his considerable fortune to build a factory camp to protect Jews in World War II Germany.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC SCHINDLERS
CALL NUMBER: DVD 940.5318 SHOAH
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC SON
A haunting modern tragedy about Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish Auschwitz survivor settled in Brooklyn after WWII. She has intense relationships with a schizophrenic genius and an aspiring Southern writer.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC SOPHIES
Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann, starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt’s famous painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Together with her inexperienced but plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg, she embarks upon a major battle which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC WOMAN
The real-life story of one working wife and mother who became a hero to hundreds during World War II. In 1939 Poland, Antonina Żabińska and her husband, Dr. Jan Żabiński, have the Warsaw Zoo flourishing under his stewardship and her care. When the Germans, invade their country they are forced to report to the Reich’s newly appointed chief zoologist, Lutz Heck. To fight back on their own terms, Antonina and Jan covertly begin working with the Resistance.
CALL NUMBER: DVD FIC ZOOKEEPERS
Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein’s three-part, six-hour documentary series examines how the American people and leaders responded to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century, and how this catastrophe challenged America’s identity as a nation of immigrants and the very ideals of democracy.
CALL NUMBER: DVD 940.53 UNITED
In World War II England, orphaned siblings William, Edmund, and Anna are evacuated from London to live in the countryside, where they bounce from home to home in search of someone willing to adopt them permanently.
CALL NUMBER: JF ALBUS
Henrietta Szold took Queen Esther as a model and worked hard to save the Jewish people. In 1912, she founded the Jewish women’s social justice organization, Hadassah. Henrietta started Hadassah determined to offer emergency medical care to mothers and children in Palestine. When WWII broke out, she rescued Jewish children from the Holocaust, and broadened Hadassah’s mission to include education, youth development, and women’s rights. Hadassah offers free help to all who need it and continues its mission to this day.
CALL NUMBER: JB SZOLD, HENRIETTA
Based on true events and beautifully illustrated, this is the story of a friendship that will last forever–told by Fred’s best friend, his beloved teddy bear.
During World War II, Fred must leave his home and live in hiding, apart from the rest of his family, but he always keeps Bear by his side. Bear knows it’s his job to take care of Fred and make sure he doesn’t feel alone.
After the war, Fred and his family are reunited and leave Holland for the United States. And still Bear is with him. When Fred grows up, he and Bear part for the first time when Bear is sent to Yad Vashem–the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, where this book was first published–to show the power of hope, friendship, and love.
CALL NUMBER: ER ARGAMAN
Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance, and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow. Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man, a man named Oskar Schindler, who saved Leon Leyson’s life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list of workers in his factory–a list that became world renowned: Schindler’s List.
CALL NUMBER: JB LEYSON, LEON
As France buckles under the Nazi regime, budding photographer Rachel Cohen must change her name, go into hiding, and bear witness to the atrocities of World War II.
CALL NUMBER: J 741.5 BILLET
The first middle-grade book from a picture book master-a harrowing, heartrending, illustrated account of his childhood escape from the terrors of war.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.53 SHULEVITZ
In August 1939 Genevieve makes an impulsive decision not to get on train to take her to boat back New York and must spend the duration of World War II with her grandmother in a small village in Alsace, France, where she becomes involved with the French resistance.
CALL NUMBER: JF GIFF
Describes the experiences of those Jewish children who were forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust and survived to tell about it.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 GRE
During World War II, families all across Europe huddled together in basements, attics, and closets as Nazi soldiers rounded up anyone Jewish. The Star of David, a symbol of faith and pride, became a tool of hate when the Nazis forced Jewish people to carry papers stamped with that star, so that it was clear who to capture. But many brave souls dared to help them.
CALL NUMBER: ER BOXER
During World War II, six million Jewish men, women, and children lost their lives under the Nazis, in one of the darkest events of modern history. The Holocaust: The Origins, Events, and Remarkable Tales of Survival is a thought-provoking new book that explores the circumstances that led to the Holocaust, examines what life was like in concentration camps, and retells incredible stories of heroism in a sensitive and accessible way for a young audience.Featuring full-color illustrations, historical photographs, and maps and charts, this large format book is perfect for parents and teachers who want to introduce this subject to young readers. Eyewitness accounts and real-life stories of loss, courage, and survival bring a humanity and immediacy to the facts and images, making The Holocaust a compelling and invaluable read for a new generation.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 STEELE
The author describes her experiences during World War II when she and her family were sent to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
CALL NUMBER: JB FRIEDMANN, ELLI
A young Jewish boy escapes the ghetto and finds a group of resistance fighters in the forests of Poland, and he must determine if he has what it takes to survive the Nazis and fight back.
CALL NUMBER: JF TARSHIS
From New York Times bestselling author Tilar Mazzeo comes the extraordinary and long forgotten story of Irena Sendler–the “female Oskar Schindler”–who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II–now adapted for a younger audience.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 MAZZEO
1938, Italy. Six-year-old Lia loves to build sandcastles at the beach and her biggest problem is her shyness and quiet, birdlike voice–until prime minister Mussolini joins forces with Hitler in World War II, and everything changes. Now there are laws saying Jewish children can’t go to school, Jews can’t work, or go on vacation. It’s difficult for Lia to understand why this is happening to her family. When her father loses his job, they must give up their home and move from city to city. As war comes closer, it becomes too dangerous to stay together, and Lia and her sisters are sent to hide at a convent. Will she ever be ‘just a girl’ again?
CALL NUMBER: J 940.53 LEVI
Imani is adopted, and she’s ready to search for her birth parents. But when she discovers the diary her Jewish great-grandmother wrote chronicling her escape from Holocaust-era Europe, Imani begins to see family in a new way.
CALL NUMBER: JF WEISSMAN
Follows the true story of Dita Kraus, a fourteen-year-old girl from Prague who after being sent to Auschwitz is chosen to protect the eight volumes prisoners have smuggled past the guards.
CALL NUMBER: J 741.5 RUBIO
Lida thought she was safe. Her neighbors wearing the yellow star were all taken away, but Lida is not Jewish. She will be fine, won’t she?But she cannot escape the horrors of World War II.Lida’s parents are ripped away from her and she is separated from her beloved sister, Larissa. The Nazis take Lida to a brutal work camp, where she and other Ukrainian children are forced into backbreaking labor. Starving and terrified, Lida bonds with her fellow prisoners, but none of them know if they’ll live to see tomorrow.When Lida and her friends are assigned to make bombs for the German army, Lida cannot stand the thought of helping the enemy. Then she has an idea. What if she sabotaged the bombs… and the Nazis?
CALL NUMBER: JF SKRYPUCH
This is the story of one refugee family’s harrowing journey, based on author Cary Fagan’s own family history. The graphic novel follows a young Jewish boy, Maurice, and his family as they flee their home in Belgium during the Second World War. They travel by train to Paris, through Spain to Portugal, and finally across the ocean to Jamaica, where they settle in an internment camp.
CALL NUMBER: J 741.5 FAGAN
During World War II, twelve-year old Miriam secretly spirits other Jewish people out of Nazi-occupied France after being separated from her family and forced into hiding.
CALL NUMBER: JF BRADLEY
When troubled twelve-year-old Alex is assigned to spend his summer volunteering at a senior living facility, he forms a unique bond with a Holocaust survivor and learns lessons that change the trajectory of his life.
CALL NUMBER: JF FORMAN
In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.
CALL NUMBER: JF LOWRY
The harrowing true story of a German-Jewish boy who had to survive World War II on his own, separated from his parents as they fled the Holocaust.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.53 DESAIZ
In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland, a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos in southern Poland, depending on her forged papers and “Aryan” features–but when a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.
CALL NUMBER: JF NIELSEN
Discusses the efforts of the Kindertransport, which rescued ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi occupied countries before the start of World War II.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 HODGE
A nine-year-old Jewish girl, helped by Irena Sendler and the Zegota organization, is smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto, given a new identity, and sent to live in the countryside for the duration of the World War II.
CALL NUMBER: JF CERRITO
War comes to the streets of Paris and Safiyyah’s life changes for ever. Her best friend’s family have fled, and the bombing makes her afraid to leave the mosque where she lives. But when her father is arrested by the Nazis for his secret Resistance work, it falls to Safiyyah to run the dangerous errands around the city. It’s not long before hundreds of persecuted Jews seek sanctuary at the mosque. Can Safiyyah find the courage to enter the treacherous catacombs under Paris and lead the Jews to safety?
CALL NUMBER: JF KHAN
When the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in 1941, twelve-year-old Michael and his family are deported from Prague to the Terezin concentration camp, where his mother’s will and ingenuity keep them from being transported to Auschwitz and certain death.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 GRUENBAUM
Eleven-year-old Sophia endeavors to prevent her increasingly forgetful eighty-eight-year-old neighbor and best friend Sophie from entering assisted living, and in the process, uncovers unexpected stories of war, loss, and hope.
CALL NUMBER: JF LOWRY
As the frightening impact of World War II creeps closer and closer to her door, eleven-year-old Ada learns to manage life on the home front
CALL NUMBER: JF BRADLEY
A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.
CALL NUMBER: JF BRADLEY
Sibert Honor author Deborah Hopkinson illuminates the true stories of Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany, risking everything to escape to safety on the Kindertransport.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.53 HOPKINSON
Sibert Honor author Deborah Hopkinson unearths the heroic stories of Jewish survivors from different countries so that we may never forget the past.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 HOPKINSON
The Holocaust was a genocide on a scale never before seen, with as many as twelve million people killed in Nazi death camps-six million of them Jews. Gail Herman traces the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, whose rabid anti-Semitism led first to humiliating anti-Jewish laws, then to ghettos all over Eastern Europe, and ultimately to the Final Solution. She presents just enough information for an elementary-school audience in a readable, well-researched book that covers one of the most horrible times in history.
CALL NUMBER: J 940.5318 HERMAN
In May 1940, Anne Frank is a young girl not quite eleven with all the ordinary problems of a little sister, but Amsterdam is about to be invaded by Nazis and after that everything changes.
CALL NUMBER: JF HOFFMAN
Torn apart by the historical events leading up to World War II, three friends from 1936 Vienna are scattered to different countries as darkness spreads throughout Europe, impacting their families and their bonds with each other.
CALL NUMBER: JF KESSLER
In Denmark during World War II, young Annet, her parents, and their neighbors help a Jewish family hide from Nazi soldiers until it is safe for them to leave Annet’s basement.
CALL NUMBER: ER ELVGREN
Tells the story of Julian’s Grandmére’s childhood as she, a Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II and how the boy she once shunned became her savior and best friend.
CALL NUMBER: JF PALACIO
August 1944, Asta, her younger sister Pieta, and their mother are caught between the invading Soviet Army and the retreating Wehrmacht in East Prussia and are forced to try and survive in the Romincka Forest with winter coming.
CALL NUMBER: JF WATKINS
Perfect for fans of suspenseful nonfiction such as books by Steve Sheinkin, this is a page-turning narrative about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and pacifist who became an unlikely hero during World War II and took part in a plot to kill Hitler. Written by two-time National Book Award finalist Patricia McCormick, author of Sold and Never Fall Down and coauthor of the young reader’s edition of I Am Malala.
CALL NUMBER: YA B BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH
Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz.
CALL NUMBER: YABT B GREENSTEIN, ROSIE
When James Bond was still in diapers, Virginia Hall was behind enemy lines, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Hitler’s henchmen. Did she have second thoughts after a terrible accident left her needing a wooden leg? Please. Virginia Hall was the baddest broad in any room she walked into. When the State Department proved to be a sexist boys’ club that wouldn’t let her in, she gave the finger to society’s expectations of women and became a spy for the British. This boss lady helped arm and train the French Resistance and organized sabotage missions. There was just one problem: The Butcher of Lyon, a notorious Gestapo commander, was after her. But, hey–Virginia’s classmates didn’t call her the Fighting Blade for nothing.
CALL NUMBER: YA B HALL, VIRGINIA
A thrilling spy mission, a moving Holocaust story, and a first-class work of narrative nonfiction.
This Sydney Taylor Book Award- and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award-winning story of Eichmann’s capture is now a major motion picture starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, Operation Finale!
CALL NUMBER: YA 341.69 BASCOMB
A gripping nonfiction graphic novel that follows the stories of Jewish children, separated from their parents, who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust. From the Sibert Honor and YALSA Award-winning creator behind The Unwanted, Drowned City, and others.
CALL NUMBER: YA 741.5 BROWN
A heartrending graphic memoir about a young Jewish girl’s fight for survival in Nazi occupied Poland, The Girl Who Sang illustrates the power of a brother’s love, the kindness of strangers, and finding hope when facing the unimaginable.
CALL NUMBER: YA 741.5 NADEL
Tells the story of Julian’s Grandmére’s childhood as she, a Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II and how the boy she once shunned became her savior and best friend.
CALL NUMBER: YA 741.5 PALACIO
Follows the true story of Dita Kraus, a fourteen-year-old girl from Prague who after being sent to Auschwitz is chosen to protect the eight volumes prisoners have smuggled past the guards.
CALL NUMBER: YA 741.5 RUBIO
Courage to Dream plunges readers into the Holocaust – one of the greatest atrocities in human history – delving into the core of what it means to face the extinction of everything and everyone you hold dear.
CALL NUMBER: YA 741.5 SHUSTERMAN
In 1945, in a now-famous piece of World War II archival footage, four-year-old Michael Bornstein was filmed by Soviet soldiers as he was carried out of Auschwitz in his grandmothers arms. Survivors Club tells the unforgettable story of how a fathers courageous wit, a mothers fierce love, and one perfectly timed illness saved his life, and how others in his family from Zarki, Poland, dodged death at the hands of the Nazis time and again with incredible deftness. Working from his own recollections as well as extensive interviews with relatives and survivors who knew the family, Michael relates his inspirational Holocaust survival story with the help of his daughter, Debbie Bornstein Holinstat. Shocking, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, this narrative nonfiction offers an indelible depiction of what happened to one Polish village in the wake of the German invasion in 1939.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.53 BORNSTEIN
From award-winning author Steve Sheinkin, a true story of two Jewish teenagers racing against time during the Holocaust–one in hiding in Hungary, and the other in Auschwitz, plotting escape.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.53 SHEINKIN
Set against a backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the reign of Nazi Germany, and the entire course of World War II in Europe, American Shoes recounts the tumultuous childhood of a young American girl and her family trapped within a country that turned against itself, where human decency eroded and then vaporized. Forced to grow up in the midst of endemic fear stoked by a ravenous madman, American Shoes portrays the breakdown of a society from a child’s point of view, deep inside a land where millions of law-abiding citizens were targeted as threats, and then removed for extermination.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.53 TURKE
Presents the untold story of the young Jewish women who became resistance fighters against the Nazis during World War II.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 BATALION
In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved, and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz–a certain death sentence–Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 DRONFIELD
In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death.
They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on August 5 they began re-creating their lives and embarked on the road to becoming American citizens.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 FINKELSTEIN
Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation forces, hid in the back of an Amsterdam office building for two years. This is Anne’s record of that time. She was thirteen when the family went into the “Secret Annex,” and in these pages, she grows to be a young woman and proves to be an insightful observer of human nature as well. A timeless story discovered by each new generation, The Diary of a Young Girl stands without peer. For young readers and adults, it continues to bring to life this young woman, who for a time survived the worst horrors the modern world had seen–and who remained triumphantly and heartbreakingly human throughout her ordeal.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 FRA
In his signature eloquent prose, backed up by thorough research, Russell Freedman tells the story of Austrian-born Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie. They belonged to Hitler Youth as young children, but began to doubt the Nazi regime. As older students, the Scholls and a few friends formed the White Rose, a campaign of active resistance to Hitler and the Nazis. Risking imprisonment or even execution, the White Rose members distributed leaflets urging Germans to defy the Nazi government. Their belief that freedom was worth dying for will inspire young readers to stand up for what they believe in.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 FREEDMAN
This title examines a somber historic event – the Holocaust. Compelling text explores the background of the Holocaust, including the events leading up to it, the aftermath and casualties, and the key people involved.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 GIT
Tells the story of Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish doctor who ran an orphanage for Jewish children in Poland and was eventually executed by the Nazis along with his staff and wards.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 MARRIN
For readers of The Boy Who Dared and Prisoner B-3087, a collection of unforgettable true stories of children hidden away during World War II.Jaap Sitters was only eight years old when his mother cut the yellow stars off his clothes and sent him, alone, on a fifteen-mile walk to hide with relatives. It was a terrifying night, one he would never forget. Before the end of the war, he would hide in secret rooms and behind walls. He would suffer from hunger, sickness, and the looming threat of Nazi raids. But he would live.This is just one of the true stories told in Hidden Like Anne Frank, a collection of eye-opening first-person accounts that share the experience of going into hiding to escape the Holocaust. Some were just toddlers when they were hidden; some were teenagers. Some hid with neighbors or family, while many were with complete strangers. But all know the pain of losing their homes, their families, even their own names. They describe the secret network that kept them safe. And they share the coincidences and close calls that made all the difference.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5318 PRINS
The Edelweiss Pirates were a loosely organized group of working-class young people in the Rhine Valley of Germany. They faced off with Nazis during the Third Reich and suffered consequences for their resistance during and after World War II.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5343 GADDY
The true story of a group of boy resistance fighters in Denmark after the Nazi invasion.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5348 HOOSE
With numerous starred reviews and accolades, from award-winning author Candace Fleming, comes the powerful and fascinating story of the brave and dedicated young women who helped turn the tides of World War II for the Allies, with their hard work and determination at Bletchley Park.
CALL NUMBER: YA 940.5486 FLEMING
The stories of the children whose families were torn apart as a result of a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
CALL NUMBER: YA 943.0864 BUASUM
From Michael L. Printz honoree & National Book Award finalist Elana K. Arnold comes the harrowing story of a young girl’s struggle to survive the Holocaust in Romania.
CALL NUMBER: YA ARNOLD
In October, 1942, seventeen-year-old Helmuth Hübener, imprisoned for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, recalls his past life and how he came to dedicate himself to bring the truth about Hitler and the war to the German people.
CALL NUMBER: YA BAR
Isa de Smit grew up in her parents’ art gallery in Amsterdam, but in the middle of the war she survives by selling fake paintings to the Nazis while trying to help her friend, Truus, smuggle Jewish babies to safety–but in 1943 it is hard to know who to trust.
CALL NUMBER: YA CAMERON
Sixteen-year-old Catholic Stefania Podgórska has worked in the Diamant family’s grocery store for four years, even falling in love with one of their sons, Izio; but when the Nazis came to Przemyśl, Poland, the Jewish Diamants are forced into the ghetto (and worse) but Izio’s brother Max manages to escape, and Stefania embarks on a dangerous course–protecting thirteen Jews in her attic, caring for her younger sister, Helena, and keeping everything secret from the two Nazi officers who are living in her house.
CALL NUMBER: YA CAMERON
In 1935, ten-year-old Alex Maki of Bainbridge Island, Washington, is horrified to discover that his new pen pal, Charlie Lévy of Paris, France, is a girl, but in spite of his initial reluctance, their letters continue over the years and they fight for their friendship even as Charlie endures the Nazi occupation and Alex leaves his family in an internment camp and joins the Army.
CALL NUMBER: YA FUKUDA
After living in an Catholic orphanage for nearly four years, a naive Jewish boy runs away and embarks on a journey across Nazi-occupied Poland to find his parents.
CALL NUMBER: YA GLEITZMAN
Based on the life of Jack Gruener, this book relates his story of survival from the Nazi occupation of Krakow, when he was eleven, through a succession of concentration camps, to the final liberation of Dachau.
CALL NUMBER: YA GRATZ
In 1943 Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, teenage Hanneke–a ‘finder’ of black market goods–is tasked with finding a Jewish girl a customer had been hiding, who has seemingly vanished into thin air, and is pulled into a web of resistance activities and secrets as she attempts to solve the mystery and save the missing girl.
CALL NUMBER: YA HESSE
Zofia, a teenage Holocaust survivor, travels across post-war Europe as she searches for her younger brother and seeks to rebuild her shattered life.
CALL NUMBER: YA HESSE
Follows Dita Kraus from age fourteen, when she is put in charge of a few forbidden books at Auschwitz concentration camp, through the end of World War II and beyond. Based on a true story.
CALL NUMBER: YA ITURBE
It’s October 1942, in Oslo, Norway. Fifteen-year-old Ilse Stern is waiting to meet boy-next-door Hermann Rod for their first date. She was beginning to think he’d never ask her; she’s had a crush on him for as long as she can remember.But Hermann won’t be able to make it tonight. What Ilse doesn’t know is that Hermann is secretly working in the Resistance, helping Norwegian Jews flee the country to escape the Nazis. The work is exhausting and unpredictable, full of late nights and code words and lies to Hermann’s parents, to his boss… to Ilse.And as life under German occupation becomes even more difficult, particularly for Jewish families like the Sterns, the choices made become more important by the hour: To speak up or to look away? To stay or to flee? To act now or wait one more day?
CALL NUMBER: YA KAURIN
The story of a man who took incredible risks and spent his considerable fortune to build a factory camp to protect Jews in World War II Germany.
CALL NUMBER: YABT FIC KENEALLY
Growing up in Newark, NJ, in the 1930s, Tommy Anspach and Benjy Puterman have always done everything together. It never mattered that Benjy was Jewish and Tommy was of German descent. But as Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party comes to power in Germany and war brews in Europe, everything changes. Tommy is sent to Camp Nordland, a Nazi youth camp for German Americans, where he quickly learns that Jews are the enemy. Heartbroken by the loss of his friend, Benjy forms a teen version of the Newark Minutemen, an anti-Nazi vigilante group, all the while hoping that Tommy will abandon his extremist beliefs. Will Benjy and Tommy be able to overcome their differences and be friends again?
CALL NUMBER: YA KRASNER
After being taken by German soldiers from a local movie theater along with other Italian boys including his Jewish friend, Roberto is forced to work in Germany, escapes into the Ukrainian winter, before desperately trying to make his way back home to Venice.
CALL NUMBER: YA NAP
Created as an avenging golem in the image of a man’s daughter who was killed by the Nazis, Vera, the Jew the Nazis cannot kill, is made for vengeance but begins to wonder if she’s more than the wrath her creator infused within her.
CALL NUMBER: YA POLYDOROS
In Warsaw, Poland, in 1942, Mira faces impossible decisions after learning that the Warsaw ghetto is to be “liquidated,” but a group of young people are planning an uprising against their Nazi captors.
CALL NUMBER: YA SAFIER
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil.
CALL NUMBER: YA SEPETYS
In 1936 Berlin, fourteen-year-old Karl Stern, considered Jewish despite a non-religious upbringing, learns to box from the legendary Max Schmeling while struggling with the realities of the Holocaust.
CALL NUMBER: YA SHARENOW
Liberated from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945, sixteen-year-old Gerta tries to make a new life for herself, aided by Lev, a fellow survivor, and Michah, who helps Jews reach Palestine.
CALL NUMBER: YA STAMPER
In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.
CALL NUMBER: YA WEIN
Follows the story of two girls as they forge a powerful friendship that carries them through horrific circumstances.
CALL NUMBER: YA WIVIOTT
Tells the story of Sophie Scholl, a young German college student who challenges the Nazi regime during World War II as part of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance group.
CALL NUMBER: YA WILSON
In Poland in the 1940s, the lives of twins Chaim and Gittel feel like a fairy tale torn apart as they must rely on each other to endure life in a ghetto and the horrors of a concentration camp where they lose everything but each other.
CALL NUMBER: YA YOLEN
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel–a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
CALL NUMBER: YA ZUSAK