Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Tunes for Bears to Dance to (New Windmill)

Tunes for Bears to Dance to (New Windmill)

by Robert Cormier

A masterful portrayal of hatred, prejudice and manipulation that challenges readers to examine how they would behave in the face of evil. Henry meets and befriends Mr. Levine, an elderly Holocaust survivor, who is carving a replica of the village where he lived and which was destroyed in the war. Henry's friendship with Mr. Levine is put to the test when his prejudiced boss, Mr. Hairston, asks Henry to destroy Mr.... (more)

The Girl in the Red Coat

by Roma Ligocka

As a child in German-occupied Poland, Roma Ligocka was known for the bright strawberry-red coat she wore against a tide of gathering darkness. Fifty years later, Roma, an artist living in Germany, attended a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and instantly knew that “the girl in the red coat”—the only splash of color in the film—was her. Thus began a harrowing journey into the past, as Roma Ligocka... (more)

I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor

I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor

by Laura Hillman

"HANNELORE, YOUR PAPA IS DEAD." In the spring of 1942 Hannelore received a letter from Mama at her school in Berlin, Germany--Papa had been arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Six weeks later he was sent home; ashes in an urn. Soon another letter arrived. "The Gestapo has notified your brothers and me that we are to be deported to the East--whatever that means." Hannelore knew: labor camps, starvation,... (more)

Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story

by Ann Kirschner

For nearly fifty years, Sala Kirschner kept a secret: she had spent five years in seven Nazi work camps. It was not until 1991 that she showed her daughter a priceless collection of more than 350 letters and a diary that revealed the astonishing story of her survival in Hitler's Germany. After volunteering to take her older sister's place for what she thought was a six-week stay in one of the first Nazi work... (more)

Fateless

by Imre Kertesz

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The... (more)

Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow

Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow

by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

"I begin with the young. We older ones are used up . . . But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world." --Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933 By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the... (more)

The White Hotel

by D. M. Thomas

It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that... (more)

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

by Iris Chang

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered--a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this... (more)

The Diplomat's Wife

by Pam Jenoff

Love was not a luxury Marta Nedermann could afford during the war. But with the Nazis defeated, her life takes a surprising turn when she meets Paul, a handsome American soldier. Their whirlwind romance is cut short when his troop is deployed, but promises of marriage and a rendezvous in London bolster Marta s spirits. Then, tragically, a plane crash claims Paul s life, and Marta is left alone to discover to her... (more)

The Devil's Arithmetic

by Jane Yolen

The Morning Gift

by Eva Ibbotson

Twenty-year-old Ruth Berger is desperate. The daughter of a Jewish-Austrian professor, she was supposed to have escaped Vienna before the Nazis marched into the city. Yet the plan went completely wrong, and while her family and fiancé are waiting for her in safety, Ruth is stuck in Vienna with no way to escape. Then she encounters her father’s younger college professor, the dashing British paleontologist... (more)

Clara's War

by Clara Kramer, Stephen Glantz

This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer's diary of her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people. Clara Kramer was a typical Polish-Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara's family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsche (ethnically German) family from their... (more)

Once

by Morris Gleitzman

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

by Michael Chabon

Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award, New York Library Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Los Angeles Times Book AwardJoe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City.His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to... (more)

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank: A Novel

by Ellen Feldman

An appealing and inventive novel…original and cathartic."—Dana Kennedy, New York Times On February 16, 1944, Anne Frank recorded in her diary that Peter, whom she at first disliked but eventually came to love, had confided in her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely. This is the story of what might have happened if the boy in hiding survived to become a man. Peter arrives in... (more)

Anne Frank Remembered

by Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold

She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope. It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their... (more)

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

by Elie Wiesel, Jon Rothschild

From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Elie Wiesel tells his story. Passionate and poignant, All Rivers Run to the Sea is an unforgettable book of love and rage, doubt and faith, despair and trust, and ultimately, of wisdom. of photos.

The Periodic Table

by Neal Ascherson, Primo Levi, Primo Tregua Levi

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World... (more)

Resistance

by Anita Shreve

The wife of a Resistance worker in Nazi-occupied Belgium falls in love with a wounded American pilot, forcing her to struggle with trust and betrayal. By the author of Strange Fits of Passion. Reprint. Tour. NYT. PW.

War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single North American family drawn into the very center of the wars maelstrom. These two multimillion-copy bestsellers capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War.

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