Non Fiction

Six Million Paper Clips: The Making of a Children's Holocaust Memorial Paperback by Peter W. Schroeder

At a middle school in a small, all white, all Protestant town in Tennessee, a special after-school class was started to teach the kids about the Holocaust, and the importance of tolerance. The students had a hard time imagining what six million was (the number of Jews the Nazis killed), so they decided to collect six million paperclips, a symbol used by the Norwegians to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors during World War II. German journalists Dagmar and Peter Schroeder, whose involvement brought the project international attention, tell the dramatic story of how the Paper Clip Project grew, culminating in the creation of The Children's Holocaust Memorial.

Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation by Muriel Emanuel and Vera Gissing

When Nicholas Winton met a friend in Prague in December 1938, he was shocked by the plight of thousands of refugees and Czech citizens desperate to flee from the advancing German army. A British organisation had been set up to help the adults, but who would save the children? Winton felt he could not walk away. He set up a makeshift office and in just three weeks interviewed thousands of distraught parents who had the courage to part with their children and send them alone to England. Armed with their details and photos, he returned to London to convince the Home Office of the urgency of the situation. He knew he was working against time. His supreme efforts resulted in eight trainloads bringing 669, mainly Jewish, children to London. For half a century these children, now dispersed and in their seventies, were unaware of the person to whom they owed their lives. To Winton, it was just a job. Even his wife knew nothing of what is undoubtedly his greatest achievement, until 1988, when clearing out the attic she came across documentation relating to the episode. From that moment, Winton's life was never the same again.

If it’s not impossible by Barbara Winton

There are around 6000 people in the world today who owe their lives to Nicholas Winton. They are the descendants of a group of refugee children rescued by him from the Nazi threat in 1939. Some of them know of his existence and the part he played in their history, many others do not. It was a short event in his life but a critical one for those whose lives were saved. For him that intervention was over in a flash and other adventures supplanted it. Only much later did this episode re-emerge in his life and ever since has brought him visitors from all over the world anxious to learn his story. This book lays out that story in detail, exploring the motivation and early experiences that led to him acting to save young lives, while others looked the other way. His motto "If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it" led him to follow his own convictions and undertake an operation others had dismissed as unnecessary or too difficult. His life thereafter was full of exploits stimulated by similar motivation which, though not so consequential, remain testimony to his character. But what was his motivation? How had his life and background led to him being ready, willing and able to conduct a successful rescue operation of 669 children from Czechoslovakia at the age of 29? His daughter has painstakingly sifted through her father's papers and talked to family and friends to construct a detailed account of his whole life. It explores the influences on his character as well as the historical events he was caught up in. Taken from his historical letters and writings, Winton's own words are introduced to convey the atmosphere of many of his diverse experiences.

Chasing Shadows by Rabbi Hugo Gryn and Naomi Gryn

The unfinished memoirs of Hugo Gryn (1930-1996), born in Berehove, Ruthenia, completed by his daughter. Ch. 11-13 (p. 123-229), written by Gryn in the USA in 1951, describe his experiences in the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a teenager. In April 1944 Gryn and his family, with the other Jews of Berehove, were interned in a nearby brick factory. In June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz. Gryn and his father were then sent to the Lieberose concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Naomi Gryn pieces together the remaining account from various writings and interviews, describing a death march which ended at Gunskirchen. Gryn's father succumbed there, shortly after the liberation; his brother perished at Auschwitz, but his mother survived. Gryn moved to England with a group of child survivors in 1946, and later became a well-known rabbi.

This is an intimate, spiritual, often humorous portrait of holocaust survivor, radio personality, and beloved rabbi Hugo Gryn, and the vanished world of his upbringing. A witness and survivor of evil, Hugo Gryn emerges with a determination to do good.

Auschwitz by Lawrence Rees

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail—from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.
Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews—their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz

The Nazi Holocaust by Ronnie S. Landau

The Nazi Holocaust is an important breakthrough in the struggle to understand this shattering event. By shunning simplistic explanations, Landau seeks to mediate between the vast, often unapproachable subject and the reader who wrestles with its meaning. Locating the Holocaust within a number of different contexts-Jewish history, German history, genocide in the modern age, and the larger story of human bigotry and the triumph of ideology over conscience-his book is a model text, brief but surprisingly comprehensive.

Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors by Helen Epstein

I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived.

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found:

- Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America;
- Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal;
- Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who--at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. 

Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo

Auschwitz and After is a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau by Charlotte Delbo, translated into English by Rose C. Lamont. Delbo, who had returned to occupied France to work in the French resistance alongside her husband, was sent to Auschwitz for her activities

The Holocaust; The Fire That Raged by Seymour Rossell

Discusses how, between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis planned and carried out a program of extermination against the Jews of Europe now known as the Holocaust, and how the Holocaust continues to affect our everyday lives.

The Holocaust: A History Of Courage And Resistance by Bea Stadtler

Classroom tool for teaching the Holocaust in the intermediate grades. its purpose is not to Horrify the young but neither does it explain away the reality of what happened - the destruction of the six million and the ways they responded.

The Pink Triangle ;The Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant

This is the first comprehensive book in English on the fate of the homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The author, a German refugee, examines the climate and conditions that gave rise to a vicious campaign

Heroes Of The Holocaust: Ordinary Britons Who Risked Their Lived

To Make A Difference by Lyn Smiith

The moving stories of 27 ordinary people who were awarded the Heroes of the Holocaust 
Some, like Frank Foley, a British spy whose cover was working at the British embassy in Berlin, took huge risks issuing forged visas to enable around 10,000 Jews to escape Germany before the outbreak of World War 2. Others, like the ten British POWs who hid and cared for Hannah Sarah Rigler as she escaped from a death march, showed great humanity in the face of horrendous cruelty and suffering. All the recipients of the award were ordinary people, acting on no one's authority but their own, who found they could not stand idly by in the face of this great evil.

Forgotten Voices Of The Holocaust by Lyn Smith

Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust is a collection of interviews with victims of the Holocaust as well as people who collaborated with or worked directly for the Nazi regime. The Imperial War Museum commissioned Lyn Smith to work with them on their sound archive

The Miracle Visas by Tanichi Yutaka

This is the dramatic story of Sempo Sugihara, Japan’s Oskar Schindler. As the Japanese Consul General in Lithuania, he saved over 5,000 lives from the Nazis by issuing illegal exit visas. The story is told through the eyes of a young Jewish refugee whose father worked closely with Sempo Sugihara. In a world of lessons unlearned, violence, and hatred, this is the wonderful story of a selfless man with a passion for humanity. This book celebrates the great miracle of life itself.

Passage To Freedom: The Sugihara Story Rise And Shine by Ken Mochizuki

The true story of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Schindler, who, with his family's encouragement, saved thousands of Jews in Lithuania during World War II.

As a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania in the 1940s, Chiune Sugihara had a chance to help thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust through Japan, but it was against his government's orders. When his five-year-old son Hiroki asked, If we don't help them, won't they die? Sugihara decided to assist the refugees.

Based on Hiroki Sugihara's own words, Passage to Freedom is the first fully illustrated children's book to tell Sugihara's heroic story, highlighting his courageous humanity, and the importance of a child's opinion in his father's decision. 

Beyond Courage by Doreen Rappaport

In a stirring chronicle, Doreen Rappaport brings to light the courage of countless Jews who organized to sabotage the Nazis and help other Jews during the Holocaust. 
Under the noses of the military, Georges Loinger smuggles thousands of children out of occupied France into Switzerland. In Belgium, three resisters ambush a train, allowing scores of Jews to flee from the cattle cars. In Poland, four brothers lead more than 1,200 ghetto refugees into the forest to build a guerrilla force and self-sufficient village. And twelve-year-old Motele Shlayan entertains German officers with his violin moments before setting off a bomb. Through twenty-one meticulously researched accounts — some chronicled in book form for the first time — Doreen Rappaport illuminates the defiance of tens of thousands of Jews across eleven Nazi-occupied countries during World War II. In answer to the genocidal madness that was Hitler’s Holocaust, the only response they could abide was resistance, and their greatest weapons were courage, ingenuity, the will to survive, and the resolve to save others or to die trying.

Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine 

In the spring of 2000, Fumiko Ishioka, the curator of a small Holocaust education centre for children in Tokyo, received a very special shipment for an exhibit she was planning. She had asked the curators at the Auschwitz museum if she could borrow some artifacts connected to the experience of children at the camp. Among the items she received was an empty suitcase. From the moment she saw it, Fumiko was captivated by the writing on the outside that identified its owner - Hana Brady, May 16, 1931, Waisenkind (the German word for orphan). Children visiting the centre were full of questions. Who was Hana Brady? Where did she come from? What was she like? How did Hana become an orphan? What happened to her? Fueled by the children’s curiosity and her own need to know, Fumiko began a year of detective work, scouring the world for clues to the story of Hana Brady. 

Writer Karen Levine follows Fumiko in her search through history, from present-day Japan, Europe and North America back to 1938 Czechoslovakia and the young Hana Brady, a fun-loving child with a passion for ice skating. Together with Fumiko, we learn of Hana's loving parents and older brother, George, and discover how the family's happy life in a small town was turned upside down by the invasion of the Nazis. Based on an award-winning CBC documentary, Hana's Suitcase takes the reader on an incredible journey full of mystery and memories, which come to life through the perspectives of Fumiko, Hana and later Hana's brother, who now lives in Canada. Photographs and original wartime documents enhance this extraordinary story that bridges cultures, generations and time.

Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers And Their Extraordinary Story Of Courage, Defiance, And Hope by Wendy Holden

Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. Strangers to each other, they were newly pregnant, and facing an uncertain fate without their husbands. Alone, scared, and with so many loved ones already lost to the Nazis, these young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left: their lives, and those of their unborn babies.

That the gas chambers ran out of Zyklon-B just after the babies were born, before they and their mothers could be exterminated, is just one of several miracles that allowed them all to survive and rebuild their lives after World War II. Born Survivors follows the mothers' incredible journey - first to Auschwitz, where they each came under the murderous scrutiny of Dr. Josef Mengele; then to a German slave labour camp where, half-starved and almost worked to death, they struggled to conceal their condition; and finally, as the Allies closed in, their hellish 17-day train journey with thousands of other prisoners to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. Hundreds died along the way but the courage and kindness of strangers, including guards and civilians, helped save these women and their children.

Sixty-five years later, the three 'miracle babies' met for the first time at Mauthausen for the anniversary of the liberation that ultimately saved them. United by their remarkable experiences of survival against all odds, they now consider each other "siblings of the heart." In Born Survivors, Wendy Holden brings all three stories together for the first time to mark their seventieth birthdays and the seventieth anniversary of the ending of the war.

A heart-stopping account of how three mothers and their newborns fought to survive the Holocaust, Born Survivors is also a life-affirming celebration of our capacity to care and to love amid inconceivable cruelty.

My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

A family’s story of human tenacity, faith and a race for survival in the face of unspeakable horror and cruelty perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jewish people.

Growing up in the safety of Britain, Jonathan Wittenberg was deeply aware of his legacy as the child of refugees from Nazi Germany. Yet, like so many others there is much he failed to ask while those who could have answered his questions were still alive.

After burying their aunt Steffi in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, Jonathan, now a rabbi, accompanies his cousin Michal as she begins to clear the flat in Jerusalem where the family have lived since fleeing Germany in the 1930s. Inside an old suitcase abandoned on the balcony they discover a linen bag containing a bundle of letters left untouched for decades. Jonathan’s attention is immediately captivated as he tries to decipher the faded writing on the long-forgotten letters. They eventually draw him into a profound and challenging quest to uncover the painful details of his father’s family’s history.

Through the wartime correspondence of his great-grandmother Regina and his grandmother, aunts and uncles, Jonathan weaves together the strands of an ancient rabbinical family with the history of Europe during the Second World War and the unfolding policies of the Nazis, telling the moving story of a family whose lives are as fragile as the paper on which they write, but whose faith in God remains steadfast.

Zachor: Child Survivors Speak by Stephen Smith

This book contains the memoirs of twenty-four Jewish children. Some were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, and others, whose very existence was threatened, lived in hiding and often constant danger. Yet all survived the terrible consequences of the Nazi's plan to exterminate European Jewry. Originally intended as a commemoration to provide their own children and grandchildren with a permanent account of their ordeal, the collection grew to become a unique collection of memories and personal accounts of this horrendous time. Few other accounts have been published exclusively written by children who survived the Holocaust. Their experiences of losing parents, siblings and relatives; hiding in ghettos; on the run; sometimes abused, and the erosion of their identities, combine to provide a vivid and moving perspective on a too little recognised aspect of an appalling period in European history. How did the children cope? After the chaos of the second world war ended, some were re-united with parents just as traumatised as they were and nearly all ended up in countries other than their own. The need to learn a new language and culture, and even sometimes a new religion, caused even more confusion. It is sometimes said that children are often too young to remember things. These moving and often unbearably painful testimonies provide the reader with an epic sense of wonder that such courage and humanity can still ignite a flame of hope and personal reconciliation in one of the darkest periods of human history. 

The Volunteer: The True Story Of The Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather 

This is the unsung story of one of the greatest heroes of the Second World War. 
In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interned at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich.His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre -- Auschwitz. 
It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi’s terrifying plans. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades. 
This is the first major account to draw on unpublished family papers, newly released archival documents and exclusive interviews with surviving resistance fighters to show how he brought the fight to the Nazis at the heart of their evil designs. 
The result is an enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances, and one man’s attempt to change the course of history. 

The School that Escaped the Nazis by Deborah Cadbury

The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm’s way. 

In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England. 

As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives. 

Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.