Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camps, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his...  more

Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camps, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

The Hiding Place proves that the light of God's love can penetrate even the darkest recesses of despair, places like the Nazi extermination camp at Ravensbruck. After protecting Dutch Jews in a secret room in their home, Corrie ten Boom, her sister and father were discovered, arrested, and...  more

The Hiding Place proves that the light of God's love can penetrate even the darkest recesses of despair, places like the Nazi extermination camp at Ravensbruck. After protecting Dutch Jews in a secret room in their home, Corrie ten Boom, her sister and father were discovered, arrested, and imprisoned. Only Corrie survived, but her faith in God remained strong-so strong that, after the war, she could forgive a former camp guard in a face-to-face meeting. More than just a spellbinding adventure, The Hiding Place is a life-changing story.

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her...  more

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

In My Hands began as one non-Jew’s challenge to any who would deny the Holocaust. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, it has become a profound document of an individual’s heroism in the face of the greatest evil mankind has known. In the fall of 1939 the Nazis invaded Irene...  more

In My Hands began as one non-Jew’s challenge to any who would deny the Holocaust. Much like The Diary of Anne Frank, it has become a profound document of an individual’s heroism in the face of the greatest evil mankind has known. In the fall of 1939 the Nazis invaded Irene Gut’s beloved Poland, ending her training as a nurse and thrusting the sixteen-year-old Catholic girl into a world of degradation that somehow gave her the strength to accomplish what amounted to miracles. Forced into the service of the German army, young Irene was able, due in part to her Aryan good looks, to use her position as a servant in an officers’ club to steal food and supplies (and even information overheard at the officers’ tables) for the Jews in the ghetto. She smuggled Jews out of the work camps, ultimately hiding a dozen people in the home of a Nazi major for whom she was housekeeper. An important addition to the literature of human survival and heroism, In My Hands is further proof of why, in spite of everything, we must believe in the goodness of people.

"Think of it as a game, Jack. Play the game right and you might outlast the Nazis."Caught up in Hitler's Final Solution to annihilate Europe's Jews, fifteen-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps. Here, simple existence...  more

"Think of it as a game, Jack. Play the game right and you might outlast the Nazis."Caught up in Hitler's Final Solution to annihilate Europe's Jews, fifteen-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps. Here, simple existence is a constant struggle, and Jack must learn to live hour to hour, day to day. Despite intolerable conditions, he resolves not to hate his captors and vows to see his family again. But even with his strong will to survive, how long can Jack continue to play this life-and-death game?Award-winning author Andrea Warren has crafted an unforgettable true story of a boy becoming a man in the shadow of the Third Reich.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gastapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner....  more

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gastapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity a secret. In wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal something of her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Soviet army, she was bombed out of her house and had to hide while drunken Russian soldiers raped women on the street. Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith created a remarkable record of survival. She saved every document and set of papers issued to her, as well as photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. Now part of the permanent collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents, several of which are included in this volume, form the fabric of a gripping new chapter in the history of the Holocaust--complex, troubling and ultimately triumphant.

Born Polish Jew, the author, Alicia Appleman Jurman, has written a memoir of award winning status. The author re-creates her valiant skills of learning to survive in Nazi-dominated, war-torn Poland. Between the ages of ten and 15, she suffered terrible hardships and encountered numerous...  more

Born Polish Jew, the author, Alicia Appleman Jurman, has written a memoir of award winning status. The author re-creates her valiant skills of learning to survive in Nazi-dominated, war-torn Poland. Between the ages of ten and 15, she suffered terrible hardships and encountered numerous brushes with death. This is an award winning memoir and a very useful addition to Holocaust literature. Although Alicia did not directly experience the death camps run by Nazis of that era, Appleman-Jurman lived in constant peril. She, and others, managed to survive only through an extraordinary combination of luck and street sense. Unfortunately, the heavy use of dialogue reconstructed more than 40 years later has an unsettling effect on the mood and plausibility of this interesting and frequently detailed and thus horrifying survival narrative.

Livia Bitton-Jackson, born Elli L. Friedmann in Czechoslavakia, was thirteen when she, her mother, and her brother were taken to Auschwitz. They were liberated in 1945 and came to the United States on a refugee boat in 1951. This is her story, written for middle school or high school students....  more

Livia Bitton-Jackson, born Elli L. Friedmann in Czechoslavakia, was thirteen when she, her mother, and her brother were taken to Auschwitz. They were liberated in 1945 and came to the United States on a refugee boat in 1951. This is her story, written for middle school or high school students. Her previous books include "Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust", which received the Christopher Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award, and the Jewish Heritage Award.

From the German invasion of Poland in 1939 to the liberation of her concentration camp in 1945, the author chronicles an adolescence shaped by the horrors of the Holocaust but strengthened by the force of her own will.

These are the true-life accounts of nine Jewish boys and girls whose lives spiraled into danger and fear as the Holocaust overtook Europe. In a time of great horror, these children each found a way to make it through the nightmare of war. Some made daring escapes into the unknown, others...  more

These are the true-life accounts of nine Jewish boys and girls whose lives spiraled into danger and fear as the Holocaust overtook Europe. In a time of great horror, these children each found a way to make it through the nightmare of war. Some made daring escapes into the unknown, others disguised their true identities, and many witnessed unimaginable horrors. But what they all shared was the unshakable belief in-- and hope for-- survival. Their legacy of courage in the face of hatred will move you, captivate you, and, ultimately, inspire you.

Fascinating true stories of courageous people, who, amidst the horror of the Holocaust, defied the Nazis to help others.

A Life in Hiding When the German army occupied Holland, Annie de Leeuw was eight years old. Because she was Jewish, the occupation put her in grave danger-she knew that to stay alive she would have to hide. Fortunately, a Gentile family, the Oostervelds, offered to help. For two years they...  more

A Life in Hiding When the German army occupied Holland, Annie de Leeuw was eight years old. Because she was Jewish, the occupation put her in grave danger-she knew that to stay alive she would have to hide. Fortunately, a Gentile family, the Oostervelds, offered to help. For two years they hid Annie and her sister, Sini, in the cramped upstairs room of their farmhouse. Most people thought the war wouldn't last long. But for Annie and Sini -- separated from their family and confined to one tiny room -- the war seemed to go on forever. In the part of the marketplace where flowers had been sold twice a week-tulips in the spring, roses in the summer-stood German tanks and German soldiers. Annie de Leeuw was eight years old in 1940 when the Germans attacked Holland and marched into the town of Winterswijk where she lived. Annie was ten when, because she was Jewish and in great danger of being cap-tured by the invaders, she and her sister Sini had to leave their father, mother, and older sister Rachel to go into hiding in the upstairs room of a remote farmhouse. Johanna de Leeuw Reiss has written a remarkably fresh and moving account of her own experiences as a young girl during World War II. Like many adults she was innocent of the German plans for Jews, and she might have gone to a labor camp as scores of families did. "It won't be for long and the Germans have told us we'll be treated well," those families said. "What can happen?" They did not know, and they could not imagine.... But millions of Jews found out. Mrs. Reiss's picture of the Oosterveld family with whom she lived, and of Annie and Sini, reflects a deep spirit of optimism, a faith in the ingenuity, backbone, and even humor with which ordinary human beings meet extraordinary challenges. In the steady, matter-of-fact, day-by-day courage they all showed lies a profound strength that transcends the horrors of the long and frightening war. Here is a memorable book, one that will be read and reread for years to come. 1973 Newbery Honor Book Notable Children's Books of 1971?1975 (ALA) Best Books of 1972 (SLJ) Outstanding Children's Books of 1972 (NYT) 1973 Jane Addams Award Honor Book Children's Books of 1972 (Library of Congress) The Buxtehude Bulla Prize 1976 (German Award for Outstanding Children's Book Promoting Peace) 1972 Jewish Book Council Children's Book Award

Budapest, Hungary: World War II. Christine is only fifteen, and she's caught in the middle of a war-torn city. Huddled in the cold, dark cellar of their bombed-out apartment building, Christine and her family listen in fear as the battle rages over their heads. They must get out of the city --...  more

Budapest, Hungary: World War II. Christine is only fifteen, and she's caught in the middle of a war-torn city. Huddled in the cold, dark cellar of their bombed-out apartment building, Christine and her family listen in fear as the battle rages over their heads. They must get out of the city -- but where will they go and how will they escape? Christine is learning some hard lessons about life -- and death -- as she struggles to stay alive amidst the horrors of war. Christine Arnothy left Hungary four years later, in 1948. While she was living in Belgium and writing this story from the diaries she had kept during hte siege of Budapest, Christine was working in a bookstore. 'Nobody knew,' she writes, 'that I would rather write books than sell them.' I Am Fifteen -- and I Don't Want to Die won the Prix de Verites (French prize for nonfiction) the year it was published.

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story...  more

In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.

A horrifying yet spellbinding account. Although Mengele was a mediocre doctor, he was encouraged in his pursuit of "genetic research" to create a "master Aryan race" with the concentration camp at Auschwitz providing an ample supply of specimens for his unscientific, poorly...  more

A horrifying yet spellbinding account. Although Mengele was a mediocre doctor, he was encouraged in his pursuit of "genetic research" to create a "master Aryan race" with the concentration camp at Auschwitz providing an ample supply of specimens for his unscientific, poorly documented experiments. Twins were his fixation, and this book interviews some of the estimated 100 survivors from an initial sample of 3000 young people. The fascination of this book is that it follows the lives of both Mengele and the twins in their readjustment to life away from the camps. This gripping tale is extremely readable and well documented, offering another facet to the human tragedy of the Holocaust.

A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the...  more

A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania between the wars and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. Ashamed to return home after her expulsion, she looked for work in Bucharest and discovered a talent for dressmaking. That talent--and her blond hair, blue eyes, and overall Gentile appearance--allowed her entry into the highest reaches of Romanian society, albeit as a dressmaker. Bernstein recounts the growing shadow of the native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, a rising tide of anti-Semitic laws, and finally, the open persecution of Romania's Jews. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp deep in Germany. Nineteen out of every twenty women transported there died. The author, her sister Esther, and two other friends banded together and, largely due to Sara's extraordinary street smarts and intuition, managed to survive. Although Bernstein was not a professional writer, she tells this story with style and power. Her daughter Marlene contributes a moving epilogue to close out Sara's life. One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs. -- Kirkus Reviews

This is the amazing story of how Rachmiel Frydland, a Jewish man, was delivered from death time after time during the years of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Perhaps more importantly, this is Frydland's account of how the God of his ancestors took over and occupied his life, delivering him...  more

This is the amazing story of how Rachmiel Frydland, a Jewish man, was delivered from death time after time during the years of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Perhaps more importantly, this is Frydland's account of how the God of his ancestors took over and occupied his life, delivering him from death -- spiritually, then physically -- and led him into a ministry of proclaiming Messiah Yeshua (Jesus). Rachmiel Frydland, a Bible and Talmudic scholar, suffered persecution under the Nazis; he was a believer in the Messiah who also suffered rejection by those who called themselves Christians during his years as a fugitive. He challenges us to consider what our response might be in similar cases of inhumanity both now and in the future.

The story of Berek Jakubowicz (now Benjamin Jacobs), a Jewish dental student, is a gripping account of the horrors of the Holocaust. Jacobs was deported in 1941 from his Polish village and taken to a Nazi labor camp where he remained a prisoner of the Reich until the ending days of war. He is...  more

The story of Berek Jakubowicz (now Benjamin Jacobs), a Jewish dental student, is a gripping account of the horrors of the Holocaust. Jacobs was deported in 1941 from his Polish village and taken to a Nazi labor camp where he remained a prisoner of the Reich until the ending days of war. He is convinced that he owes his survival to the possession of a few dental tools and rudimentary skills as he was moved from labor camp to labor camp. Jacobs writes about the loss of family, what life was like as a prisoner, and the horrible truths about the Holocaust that only a survivor can tell. “Goes far beyond most personal accounts of the Holocaust in reflecting the author’s raw courage, his will power, and his luck over a seemingly never-ending four-year period.”—Gerard E. Silberstein

Filip Muller's firsthand account of three years in the gas chambers. One of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it, Muller has written one of the key documents of the Holocaust. A very detailed description of day-to-day life, if we can call it that, in...  more

Filip Muller's firsthand account of three years in the gas chambers. One of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it, Muller has written one of the key documents of the Holocaust. A very detailed description of day-to-day life, if we can call it that, in Hell's inmost circle ...jammed with infernal information too terrible to be taken all at once. Foreword by Yehuda Bauer.

"From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the...  more

"From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner. But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination. Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz. From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities. The original Polish manuscript was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn in 1980 in the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective.

Memoir of a Hungarian woman who was imprisoned for several years in the German concentration camp Auschwitz. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only...  more

Memoir of a Hungarian woman who was imprisoned for several years in the German concentration camp Auschwitz. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz does not retreat into self-pit or sensationalism. When Five Chimneys was first published (two years after World War II ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". Today, with "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, and neo-Nazis on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. Five Chimneys is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist. -- Midwest Book Reviews