Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A Holocaust Journal

The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's life during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English Renia Spiegel was born in 1924 to an upper-middle class Jewish family living in southeastern Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. At the start of 1939 Renia began a diary. “I just want a friend. I want somebody to talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who would feel what I feel, who would believe me, who would never reveal my secrets. A human being can never be such a friend and that’s why I have decided to look for a confidant in the form of a diary.” And so begins an extraordinary document of an adolescent girl’s hopes and dreams. By the fall of 1939, Renia and her younger sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were staying with their grandparents in Przemysl, a city in the south, just as the German and Soviet armies invaded Poland. Cut off from their mother, who was in Warsaw, Renia and her family were plunged into war. Like Anne Frank, Renia’s diary became a record of her daily life as the Nazis spread throughout Europe. Renia writes of her mundane school life, her daily drama with best friends, falling in love with her boyfriend Zygmund, as well as the agony of missing her mother, separated by bombs and invading armies. Renia had aspirations to be a writer, and the diary is filled with her poignant and thoughtful poetry. When she was forced into the city’s ghetto with the other Jews, Zygmund is able to smuggle her out to hide with his parents, taking Renia out of the ghetto, but not, ultimately to safety. The diary ends in July 1942, completed by Zygmund, after Renia is murdered by the Gestapo. Renia's Diary has been translated from the original Polish, and includes a preface, afterword, and notes by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak. An extraordinary historical document, Renia Spiegel survives through the beauty of her words and the efforts of those who loved her and preserved her legacy.

Renia's Diary

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New Jersey

The Hinge of History

Acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leading superpower. In the long-awaited follow-up to the widely praised December 1941, Craig Shirley's April 1945 paints a vivid portrait of America--her people, faith, economy, government, and culture. The year of 1945 bought a series of watershed events that transformed the country into an arsenal of democracy, one that no longer armed the world by necessity but henceforth protected the world by need. At the start of 1945, America and the rest of the world were grieving millions of lives lost in the global conflict. As President Roosevelt was sworn into his fourth term, optimism over an end to the bloody war had grown--then, in April, several events collided that changed the face of the world forever: the sudden death of President Roosevelt followed by Harry S. Truman's rise to office; Adolph Hitler's suicide; and the horrific discoveries of Dachau and Auschwitz. Americans doubled down on their completion of the atomic bomb and their plans to drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destruction ultimately leading the Japanese Empire to surrender on V-J day and ending World War II for good. Combining engaging anecdotes with deft research and details that are both diminutive and grand, April 1945 gives readers a front-row seat to the American stage at the birth of a brand-new world.

April 1945

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This heroic true story of the three youngest children of a bourgeois Catholic family who worked together in the French Resistance is told by an American writer who has known and admired the family for five decades  

In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived three concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany. His parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches’s answer to dealing with the unbearable. This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

In the autumn of 1943, Andre Boulloche became de Gaulle's military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. Andre survived three concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany. His parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches's answer to dealing with the unbearable. This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.

The Cost of Courage

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Oregon

Milkweed

Mary Doria Russell

Missouri

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of "The Sparrow" and "Children of God." High school & older.

A Thread of Grace

32242a2d-468a-48b9-85cf-9db842d6797f-1

New York

Holocaust

Anita Diamant

Michigan

A tale inspired by the post-Holocaust experience is set in an immigrant holding camp in 1945 Palestine, where four women, refugees from Nazi Europe, find healing in the bonds of friendship that are forged while recounting their losses.

Day after Night

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Except for a small stain in the upper right corner pages, the book is pristine! Read this for a book discussion—a touching Holocaust-period read. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Secret Star

e59a3255-d30c-492a-850e-dda273175988-0

In nearly perfect condition. Just has a library stamp on the inside cover. Please note this is the “Young Readers” edition of this book.

Colorado

Young Reader’s Edition

Irena’s Children 

Frank McCourt

Texas

A Memoir

Frank McCourt returned to America when he was nineteen. For many years, he was an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. The sequel to "Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, " will be published in the fall of 1999. McCourt lives in Connecticut.

Angela's Ashes

27680489-af28-494f-b4dd-c0e4e5802eeb-1

Dana Fitzwater Cornell

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Wisconsin

A Holocaust Historical Novel

The Holocaust didn't really end in 1945. Not for everyone. Even after the war, survivors' lives were influenced by their terrifying experiences. Some of them were never able to retell their stories-for others, it took decades.

In My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel, Henryk Frankowski feels compelled to pen his memoir and finally share his poignant story from his hospital bed as he lay dying. His carefree childhood as a Jewish boy in Warsaw, Poland is never far from his mind as he recalls the tumultuous world he endured during the Holocaust. Henryk speaks uninhibitedly about the intense bond he has with his family, particularly his adoration for his nurturing mother. Ultimately, the Frankowskis' lives are broken apart as World War II ignites and the Nazis storm across Europe, imprisoning and killing millions. As senseless restrictions are implemented, living conditions are compressed, circumstances turn dire, and callous disregard for human life runs rampant, Henryk must find the resilience to carry on. All the while, he dreams of a family reunion in Warsaw...

My Mother's Ring

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#paperback #grandmother #holocaust #survivor #bonding #strength #friendship

Utah

Missing Girls

The Heart has Reasons

After liberation from Auschwitz, 14-year old Elli, her brother, and their mother attempt to rebuild their lives in Czechoslavakia. But this is not easy. It doesn't take long for Elli to realize that even though the war is over, Anti-Semitism is not.

My Bridges of Hope

Title Page and next page have a mild crumple and smudge. Otherwise in perfect condition. See photos. 

In the spirit of We Were the Lucky Ones and We Must Be Brave, a heartbreaking World War II novel of one mother's impossible choice, and her search for her daughter against the odds. As a Russian Jewish émigré to France, Vera's wealth cannot protect her or her four-year-old-daughter, Lucie, once the Nazis occupy the country. After receiving notice that all foreigners must report to an internment camp, Vera has just a few hours to make an impossible choice: Does she subject Lucie to the horrid conditions of the camp, or does she put her into hiding with her beloved and trusted governess, safe until Vera can retrieve her? Believing the war will end soon, Vera chooses to leave Lucie in safety. She cannot know that she and her husband will have an opportunity to escape, to flee to America. She cannot know that Lucie's governess will have fled with Lucie to family in rural France, too far to reach in time. And so begins a heartbreaking journey and separation, a war and a continent apart. Vera's marriage will falter under the surreal sun of California. Her ability to write--once her passion--will disappear. But Vera's love for Lucie, her faith that her daughter lives, will only grow. As Vera's determination to return to France and find Lucie crystalizes, she meets Sasha, a man on his own search for meaning. She is stronger with Sasha than she is alone. Together they will journey to Lucie. They will find her fate.

Those Who Are Saved

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Indiana

What The Night Sings

The Devil’s Arithmetic 

Jessica Shattuck

North Carolina

A Novel

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE NEW CHAPTER GoodReads Choice Awards Semifinalist "Moving . . . a plot that surprises and devastates."—New York Times Book Review "A masterful epic."—People magazine "Mesmerizing . . . The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history’s most tragic eras."—USA Today Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges. Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.

The Women in the Castle

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Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past

A moving account of a mother and daughter who visit Germany to face the Holocaust tragedy that has caused their family decades of intergenerational trauma, from the author of Brothers, Sisters, Strangers

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award
 
In 1938, when Edith Westerfeld was twelve, her parents sent her from Germany to America to escape the Nazis. Edith survived, but most of her family perished in the death camps. Unable to cope with the loss of her family and homeland, Edith closed the door on her past, refusing to discuss even the smallest details.
 
Fifty-four years later, when the void of her childhood was consuming both her and her family, she returned to Stockstadt with her grown daughter Fern. For Edith the trip was a chance to reconnect and reconcile with her past; for Fern it was a chance to learn what lay behind her mother's silent grief. Together, they found a town that had dramatically changed on the surface, but which hid guilty secrets and lived in enduring denial.
 
On their journey, Fern and her mother shared many extraordinary encounters with the townspeople and--more importantly--with one another, closing the divide that had long stood between them. Motherland is a story of learning to face the past, of remembering and honoring while looking forward and letting go. It is an account of the Holocaust's lingering grip on its witnesses; it is also a loving story of mothers and daughters, roots, understanding, and, ultimately, healing.

Motherland

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Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood

Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden -- just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat -- Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war -- and a few brave adults who opposed the Nazi regime -- aroused in her skepticism of National Socialist ideology and the Nazi propaganda she was taught to believe in. In May 1945, an eleven-year-old Hunt watched American troops occupy Hitler's mountain retreat, signaling the end of the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. As the Nazi crimes began to be accounted for, many Germans tried to deny the truth of what had occurred; Hunt, in contrast, was determined to know and face the facts of her country's criminal past. On Hitler's Mountain is more than a memoir -- it is a portrait of a nation that lost its moral compass. It is a provocative story of a family and a community in a period and location in history that, though it is fast becoming remote to us, has important resonance for our own time.

On Hitler's Mountain

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& Many recent books have documented the collaboration of the French authorities with the anti-Jewish German policies of World War II. Yet about 76 percent of France& ’ s Jews survived& — more than in almost any other country in Western Europe. How do we explain this phenomenon? Certainly not by looking at official French policy, for the Vichy government began preparing racial laws even before the German occupiers had decreed such laws. To provide a full answer to the question of how so many French Jews survived, Susan Zuccotti examines the response of the French people to the Holocaust. Drawing on memoirs, government documents, and personal interviews with survivors, she tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary French men and women. Zuccotti argues that the French reaction to the Holocaust was not as reprehensible as it has been portrayed.

The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews

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#nonfiction #paperback #history #scholastic #holocaust #nazigermany #ww2

Children of the Holocaust

Escape

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Pam Jenoff

Georgia

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of unfathomable sacrifice and unlikely friendship during World War II. 1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of 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 sewers beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and 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. Scorned by her friends and longing for her fiancé, who has gone off to war, Ella wanders Kraków restlessly. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it's a girl hiding. Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but 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. Inspired by harrowing true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an emotional testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.

The Woman with the Blue Star

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B. A. Shapiro

Rated 3.8 out of 5 on Goodreads! Readers guide, and other special features included within the book.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

Don't miss B. A. Shapiro's new novel, The Collector's Apprentice, available now! “Vibrant and suspenseful . . . Like The Art Forger, this new story takes us into the heart of what it means to be an artist.” —The Washington Post “B. A. Shapiro captivated us in 2012 with her ‘addictive’ novel The Art Forger. Now, she’s back with another thrilling tale from the art world.” —Entertainment Weekly When Alizée Benoit, an American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her artistic patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. And, some seventy years later, not her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, who while working at Christie’s auction house uncovers enigmatic paintings hidden behind works by those now-famous Abstract Expressionist artists. Do they hold answers to the questions surrounding her missing aunt?

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Renia Spiegel; Elizabeth Bellak (Contribution by); Sarah Durand (Contribution by); Deborah Lipstadt (Introduction by)

Renia's Diary

Craig Shirley

April 1945

Charles Kaiser

The Cost of Courage

Jerry Spinelli

Milkweed

Mary Doria Russell

A Thread of Grace

Gerald Green

Holocaust

Anita Diamant

Day after Night

Sharon Flitterman-King

A Secret Star

Tilar J. Mazzeo

Irena’s Children

Frank McCourt

Angela's Ashes

Dana Fitzwater Cornell

My Mother's Ring

Lois Metzger

Missing Girls

Mark Klempner

The Heart has Reasons

Livia Bitton-Jackson

My Bridges of Hope

Alexis Landau

Those Who Are Saved

Vesper Stamper

What The Night Sings

Jane Yolen

The Devil’s Arithmetic

Jessica Shattuck

The Women in the Castle

Fern Schumer Chapman

Motherland

Irmgard A. Hunt

On Hitler's Mountain

Susan Zuccotti

The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews

Allan Zullo

Escape

Pam Jenoff

The Woman with the Blue Star

B. A. Shapiro

The Muralist