World War II
Bartoltetti, Susan Campbell. The Boy Who Dared. Scholastic, Inc. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780439680134
When 16-year-old Helmuth Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers Germany is lying to the people. But when he tries to expose the truth with leaflets, he's tried for treason. Sentenced to death and waiting in a jail cell, Helmuth's story emerges in a series of flashbacks that show his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times, to a sensitive and mature young man who thinks for himself.
Blundell, Judy. What I Saw and How I Lied. Scholastic, Inc. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780439903462
Judy Blundell creates a fast-paced, suspenseful look at the after-effects of World War II through the eyes of fifteen-year-old, wanna-be-eighteen, Evie. The war has ended; Evie's stepfather has returned home safely and takes Evie and her mother on an unexpected trip to Palm Beach, Fla. Evie falls in love with movie-star-handsome Peter, only to discover herself caught in a web of lies spun by her family. Suddenly, the protected and innocent teen stands to lose everything she holds dear, and anti-Jewish sentiments of the war become personal issues. Blundell deftly fashions Evie as an innocent but glamour-struck post-war teen who must almost instantly develop the integrity and self-reliance to make impossibly tough judgments. Evie is fascinatingly multifaceted as she approaches adulthood in ways she—and readers—never anticipated.
Boyne, John. The Boy in Striped Pajamas. Random House Children's Books. 2007. ISBN-13: 9780385751537
Through the eyes of an innocent nine-year-old boy named Bruno, listeners become complicit bystanders, observing some of the horrors of the Holocaust. Maloney's soft-toned narration and chipper, believably childlike characterization of Bruno dramatically bring home the fable-like qualities of Boyne's moving text. Bruno's limited comprehension of all going on around him begs listeners, presumably with more knowledge than the protagonist, to glean the fuller story between the lines. When his father, an officer for "the Fury," as Bruno refers to him, is transferred from Berlin to a new post in Poland called "Out-With," Bruno and his family try to adjust. From his new bedroom window Bruno can see a fenced-in camp where all the inhabitants wear striped pajamas. He learns more about this intriguing place when he befriends a boy inside the camp named Shmuel (who happens to share Bruno's birthday). Their friendship progresses dangerously and brings Boyne's tale to a shocking end that is sure to be a discussion starter.
Bruchac, Joseph. Code Talker. Penguin Group. 2005. ISBN-13: 9780803729216 910L
Throughout World War II, in the conflict fought against Japan, Navajo code talkers were a crucial part of the U.S. effort, sending messages back and forth in an unbreakable code that used their native language. They braved some of the heaviest fighting of the war, and with their code, they saved countless American lives. Yet their story remained classified for more than twenty years. But now Joseph Bruchac brings their stories to life for young adults through the riveting fictional tale of Ned Begay, a sixteen-year-old Navajo boy who becomes a code talker. His grueling journey is eye-opening and inspiring. This deeply affecting novel honors all of those young men, like Ned, who dared to serve, and it honors the culture and language of the Navajo Indians.
Chambers, Aidan. Postcards from No Man’s Land. Penguin Group. 2004. ISBN-13: 9780142401453 900L
Jacob, a 17-year-old English boy, has come to Amsterdam to honor the memory of his namesake grandfather at a memorial service for British soldiers who fought against the German occupation of the Netherlands in WW II. This grandfather was wounded at Arnhem, and though a Dutch girl tended him lovingly, he died in Holland. There are two alternating narratives in this intricately plotted tale: that of shy, insecure, present-day Jacob learning about Amsterdam and Dutch customs, making new friends, and finding out more about himself and his family's past; and the journal of Geertrui, the 19-year-old girl who cared for his grandfather. In the present, Jacob has his money swiped, meets fascinating characters like brash Daan and his attractive gay friend Ton, and finds himself a girlfriend—at his grandfather's grave. In Geertrui's narrative, we learn about the privations of life in occupied Holland, the awfulness of battle and the youth and bravery of the soldiers. Geertrui defies her parents and takes wounded Jacob into hiding in the countryside with her, where they become lovers. The connection between the two narratives becomes clear toward the end when Jacob meets Geertrui, on her death-bed, and learns about how his family and hers are linked. Winner of the UK's Carnegie Medal, this is a complex and thought provoking novel. Geertrui's narrative, with its drama of love and war, is the more exciting, but Jacob's present-day journey toward knowledge and self-acceptance is also intriguing, as he tries to understand his own sexuality and the sexual openness of his new friends and learns more about love, art, and life. For sophisticated, mature YA readers.
Chotjewitz, David. Daniel Half-Human: And the Good Nazi. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2004. ISBN-13: 9780689857478740L
All his life, Daniel has been hiding. He just doesn't know it. Until the spring of 1933, he's enjoyed a comfortable German boyhood with his well-to-do family, in school, at soccer. Daniel's even enjoyed jail — for one exciting night — with his best friend, Armin, after they've been caught painting a swastika on a wall in the hated Communist section of Hamburg. In their cell, the boys cut their wrists, mingle blood, and swear lasting brotherhood. Then, a thunderclap: Daniel learns to his horror that his mother is Jewish, that he is therefore half-Jewish and, in Aryan eyes, half-human. Daniel keeps the truth a secret. He and Armin still talk of joining the Hitler Youth. But Armin's father, an out-of-work longshoreman and a Socialist, forbids it. Armin joins anyway, with fateful consequences for Daniel's family. Throughout World War II, and until the story's haunting final scene, each friend holds the life of the other in his hands.
Durbin, William. The Winter War. Random House Children's Books. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780385746526
When the Soviet Union invades its tiny neighbor Finland in November 1939, Marko volunteers to help the war effort. Even though his leg was weakened by polio, he can ski well, and he becomes a messenger on the front line, skiing in white camouflage through the forests at night. The dark forest is terrifying, and so are the odds against the Finns: the Russians have 4 times as many soldiers and 30 times as many planes. They have 3000 tanks, while the Finns have 30. But a tank is no help in the snowy forest–a boy on skis is. And the Russians don’t know winter the way the Finns do, or what tough guerrilla warriors the Finns are. Marko teams up with another messenger, Karl. Gradually Marko learns that Karl’s whole family was killed by the Russians. And Karl has a secret–he’s really Kaari, a girl who joined up to get revenge for her family’s deaths.
Fletcher, Christine. Ten Cents a Dance. Bloomsbury USA. 2008. ISBN-13: 9781599901640 630L
With her mother ill, it’s up to fifteen-year-old Ruby Jacinski to support her family. But in the 1940s, the only opportunities open to a Polish-American girl from Chicago’s poor Yards is a job in one of the meat packing plants. Through a chance meeting with a local tough, Ruby lands a job as a taxi dancer and soon becomes an expert in the art of “fishing”: working her patrons for meals, cash, clothes, even jewelry. Drawn ever deeper into the world of dance halls, jazz, and the mob, Ruby gradually realizes that the only one who can save her is herself. A mesmerizing look into a little known world and era.
Greene, Bette. Summer of My German Soldier.Penguin Group. 2006. ISBN-13: 9780142406519800L
Minutes before the train pulled into the station in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, Patty Bergen knew something exciting was going to happen. But she never could have imagined that her summer would be so memorable. German prisoners of war have arrived to make their new home in the prison camp in Jenkinsville. To the rest of her town, these prisoners are only Nazis. But to Patty, a young Jewish girl with a turbulent home life, one boy in particular becomes an unlikely friend. Anton relates to Patty in ways that her mother and father never can. But when their forbidden relationship is discovered, will Patty risk her family and town for the understanding and love of one boy?
Hughes, Dean. Soldier Boys. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2003. ISBN-13: 9780689860218 790L
Spencer Morgan And Dieter Hedrick, one American, one German, are both young and eager to get into action in the war. Dieter, a shining member of the Hitler Youth movement, has actually met the Führer himself and was praised for his hard work. Now he is determined to make it to the front lines, to push back the enemy and defend the honor of the Fatherland. Spencer, just sixteen, must convince his father to sign his induction papers. He is bent on becoming a paratrooper -- the toughest soldiers in the world. He will prove to his family and hometown friends that he is more than the little guy with crooked teeth. He¹ll prove to his father that he can amount to something and keep his promises. Everyone will look at him differently when he returns home in his uniform, trousers tucked into his boots in the paratrooper style. Both boys get their wishes when they are tossed into intense conflict during the Battle of the Bulge. And both soon learn that war is about a lot more than proving oneself and one¹s bravery. Dean Hughes offers young readers a wrenching look at parallel lives and how innocence must eventually be shed.
Kadohata, Cynthia. Weedflower. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2009. ISBN-13: 9781416975663
Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. Now, other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor and Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new “home.” Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they’d been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend…. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both.
Klages, Ellen. The Green Glass Sea. Penguin Group. 2008. ISBN: 978-0-14241149-0.
It is 1943, and eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is en route to New Mexico, to live with her mathematician father. Soon she arrives at a town that, officially, doesn't exist. It is called Los Alamos, and it is abuzz with activity, as scientists and mathematicians from all over America and Europe work on the biggest secret of all—"the gadget." None of them—not J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project; not the mathematicians and scientists; and least of all, Dewey—know how much "the gadget" is about to change their lives.
Nolan, Han. If I Should Die Before I Wake. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2003. ISBN-13: 9780152046798 840L
Can an alienated, Jew-hating, Neo-Nazi teenager have lived a previous life as a Polish Jewish girl in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust? Can a motorcycle accident which lands her comatose in a Jewish hospital be the vehicle for her tumbling through time repeatedly to relive that life while fighting for this one? Can her horrendous experiences of surviving but losing everything, including her family, and finally giving up her last food to another girl shake her out of the self-destructive life she has fashioned for herself here in the today world? This is an intriguing and touching story that weaves the terrible drama of the Nazis' destruction of an entire population together with the age-old belief in reincarnation and past lives.
Peet, Mal. Tamar. Candlewick Press. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780763640637
When her grandfather dies, Tamar inherits a box containing a series of clues and coded messages. Out of the past, another Tamar emerges, a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland half a century before. His story is one of passionate love, jealousy, and tragedy set against the daily fear and casual horror of the Second World War — and unraveling it is about to transform Tamar’s life forever.
Spinelli, Jerry. Milkweed. Random House Children's Books . 2005. ISBN-13: 9780440420057 510L
When readers first meet the orphan narrator, he is running. "Stop!" and Thief!" are words so familiar to him that he takes them as his name. Stopthief is one of a band of boys living on the streets and in the stables of Warsaw before the Nazi occupation. This devastating narrative follows his journey from the streets into the Ghetto and through the end of the war. Stopthief is renamed Misha by Uri, the leader of the orphan band, and told that he is a Russian gypsy, not a Jew. Misha is awestruck by the "Jackboots" who take over the city. After he is herded into the Jewish Ghetto, he steals food for his adopted family and the local orphanage. As conditions in the ghetto worsen, his ability to smuggle in and out of its walls turns him from thief to savior. Spinelli's works features more than one irrepressible hero who rises above the social confines of his or her day. In placing such a character in one of history's darkest hours, he challenges readers to see the Holocaust anew, to experience it in the moment. Misha is both insider and outsider, without history and without knowledge, and through his eyes the reader knows the disorientation, the confusion, and the mounting horror of a people who, unlike the modern reader, do not know what is to come. It is too simple to call him an archetype. His daring, part courage and part naïveté, comes at a cost, and only in the book's final chapters does one come to understand the price of his dissociation. Neither oppressor or oppressed, he is a tragic figure, ultimately alone despite his loyalty to Uri and to his adopted sister Janina.
Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust. Holiday House, Inc. 1988. ISBN-13: 9780823406975
Rogasky's graphic and moving chronicle of 20th-Century genocide in the western world tackles enormous questions of ethics, values, and history. She begins with an analysis of the roots of anti-Semitism, and sketches in how Hitler came to power. Then Rogasky details the dark horror of Nazismfrom the beginning pogroms the Nazis organized against German Jews to the setting up of concentration camps and death factories. She utilizes many primary sources’ personal narratives of victims and survivors and the records left by the Nazis to tell the story of mass murder. In clear and simple prose, she relates how the Jews lived and died in the camps, how they fought and prayed, how a few escaped, and how a small number of non-Jews helped them in their struggle. She concludes with an account of the Nuremburg Trials and the many instances of contemporary anti-Semitism that have outlived Hitler. Black-and-white photos, many of them vivid reminders of the genocide, underscore the dark events described.
Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Random House Children's Books. 2007. ISBN-13: 9780375842207
When Death tells a story, you pay attention. Liesel Meminger is a young girl growing up outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, and Death tells her story as "an attempt-a flying jump of an attempt-to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it." When her foster father helps her learn to read and she discovers the power of words, Liesel begins stealing books from Nazi book burnings and the mayor's wife's library. As she becomes a better reader, she becomes a writer, writing a book about her life in such a miserable time. Liesel's experiences move Death to say, "I am haunted by humans." How could the human race be "so ugly and so glorious" at the same time? This big, expansive novel is a leisurely working out of fate, of seemingly chance encounters and events that ultimately touch, like dominoes as they collide. The writing is elegant, philosophical and moving. Even at its length, it's a work to read slowly and savor. Beautiful and important.
When 16-year-old Helmuth Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers Germany is lying to the people. But when he tries to expose the truth with leaflets, he's tried for treason. Sentenced to death and waiting in a jail cell, Helmuth's story emerges in a series of flashbacks that show his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times, to a sensitive and mature young man who thinks for himself.
Blundell, Judy. What I Saw and How I Lied. Scholastic, Inc. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780439903462
Judy Blundell creates a fast-paced, suspenseful look at the after-effects of World War II through the eyes of fifteen-year-old, wanna-be-eighteen, Evie. The war has ended; Evie's stepfather has returned home safely and takes Evie and her mother on an unexpected trip to Palm Beach, Fla. Evie falls in love with movie-star-handsome Peter, only to discover herself caught in a web of lies spun by her family. Suddenly, the protected and innocent teen stands to lose everything she holds dear, and anti-Jewish sentiments of the war become personal issues. Blundell deftly fashions Evie as an innocent but glamour-struck post-war teen who must almost instantly develop the integrity and self-reliance to make impossibly tough judgments. Evie is fascinatingly multifaceted as she approaches adulthood in ways she—and readers—never anticipated.
Boyne, John. The Boy in Striped Pajamas. Random House Children's Books. 2007. ISBN-13: 9780385751537
Through the eyes of an innocent nine-year-old boy named Bruno, listeners become complicit bystanders, observing some of the horrors of the Holocaust. Maloney's soft-toned narration and chipper, believably childlike characterization of Bruno dramatically bring home the fable-like qualities of Boyne's moving text. Bruno's limited comprehension of all going on around him begs listeners, presumably with more knowledge than the protagonist, to glean the fuller story between the lines. When his father, an officer for "the Fury," as Bruno refers to him, is transferred from Berlin to a new post in Poland called "Out-With," Bruno and his family try to adjust. From his new bedroom window Bruno can see a fenced-in camp where all the inhabitants wear striped pajamas. He learns more about this intriguing place when he befriends a boy inside the camp named Shmuel (who happens to share Bruno's birthday). Their friendship progresses dangerously and brings Boyne's tale to a shocking end that is sure to be a discussion starter.
Bruchac, Joseph. Code Talker. Penguin Group. 2005. ISBN-13: 9780803729216 910L
Throughout World War II, in the conflict fought against Japan, Navajo code talkers were a crucial part of the U.S. effort, sending messages back and forth in an unbreakable code that used their native language. They braved some of the heaviest fighting of the war, and with their code, they saved countless American lives. Yet their story remained classified for more than twenty years. But now Joseph Bruchac brings their stories to life for young adults through the riveting fictional tale of Ned Begay, a sixteen-year-old Navajo boy who becomes a code talker. His grueling journey is eye-opening and inspiring. This deeply affecting novel honors all of those young men, like Ned, who dared to serve, and it honors the culture and language of the Navajo Indians.
Chambers, Aidan. Postcards from No Man’s Land. Penguin Group. 2004. ISBN-13: 9780142401453 900L
Jacob, a 17-year-old English boy, has come to Amsterdam to honor the memory of his namesake grandfather at a memorial service for British soldiers who fought against the German occupation of the Netherlands in WW II. This grandfather was wounded at Arnhem, and though a Dutch girl tended him lovingly, he died in Holland. There are two alternating narratives in this intricately plotted tale: that of shy, insecure, present-day Jacob learning about Amsterdam and Dutch customs, making new friends, and finding out more about himself and his family's past; and the journal of Geertrui, the 19-year-old girl who cared for his grandfather. In the present, Jacob has his money swiped, meets fascinating characters like brash Daan and his attractive gay friend Ton, and finds himself a girlfriend—at his grandfather's grave. In Geertrui's narrative, we learn about the privations of life in occupied Holland, the awfulness of battle and the youth and bravery of the soldiers. Geertrui defies her parents and takes wounded Jacob into hiding in the countryside with her, where they become lovers. The connection between the two narratives becomes clear toward the end when Jacob meets Geertrui, on her death-bed, and learns about how his family and hers are linked. Winner of the UK's Carnegie Medal, this is a complex and thought provoking novel. Geertrui's narrative, with its drama of love and war, is the more exciting, but Jacob's present-day journey toward knowledge and self-acceptance is also intriguing, as he tries to understand his own sexuality and the sexual openness of his new friends and learns more about love, art, and life. For sophisticated, mature YA readers.
Chotjewitz, David. Daniel Half-Human: And the Good Nazi. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2004. ISBN-13: 9780689857478740L
All his life, Daniel has been hiding. He just doesn't know it. Until the spring of 1933, he's enjoyed a comfortable German boyhood with his well-to-do family, in school, at soccer. Daniel's even enjoyed jail — for one exciting night — with his best friend, Armin, after they've been caught painting a swastika on a wall in the hated Communist section of Hamburg. In their cell, the boys cut their wrists, mingle blood, and swear lasting brotherhood. Then, a thunderclap: Daniel learns to his horror that his mother is Jewish, that he is therefore half-Jewish and, in Aryan eyes, half-human. Daniel keeps the truth a secret. He and Armin still talk of joining the Hitler Youth. But Armin's father, an out-of-work longshoreman and a Socialist, forbids it. Armin joins anyway, with fateful consequences for Daniel's family. Throughout World War II, and until the story's haunting final scene, each friend holds the life of the other in his hands.
Durbin, William. The Winter War. Random House Children's Books. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780385746526
When the Soviet Union invades its tiny neighbor Finland in November 1939, Marko volunteers to help the war effort. Even though his leg was weakened by polio, he can ski well, and he becomes a messenger on the front line, skiing in white camouflage through the forests at night. The dark forest is terrifying, and so are the odds against the Finns: the Russians have 4 times as many soldiers and 30 times as many planes. They have 3000 tanks, while the Finns have 30. But a tank is no help in the snowy forest–a boy on skis is. And the Russians don’t know winter the way the Finns do, or what tough guerrilla warriors the Finns are. Marko teams up with another messenger, Karl. Gradually Marko learns that Karl’s whole family was killed by the Russians. And Karl has a secret–he’s really Kaari, a girl who joined up to get revenge for her family’s deaths.
Fletcher, Christine. Ten Cents a Dance. Bloomsbury USA. 2008. ISBN-13: 9781599901640 630L
With her mother ill, it’s up to fifteen-year-old Ruby Jacinski to support her family. But in the 1940s, the only opportunities open to a Polish-American girl from Chicago’s poor Yards is a job in one of the meat packing plants. Through a chance meeting with a local tough, Ruby lands a job as a taxi dancer and soon becomes an expert in the art of “fishing”: working her patrons for meals, cash, clothes, even jewelry. Drawn ever deeper into the world of dance halls, jazz, and the mob, Ruby gradually realizes that the only one who can save her is herself. A mesmerizing look into a little known world and era.
Greene, Bette. Summer of My German Soldier.Penguin Group. 2006. ISBN-13: 9780142406519800L
Minutes before the train pulled into the station in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, Patty Bergen knew something exciting was going to happen. But she never could have imagined that her summer would be so memorable. German prisoners of war have arrived to make their new home in the prison camp in Jenkinsville. To the rest of her town, these prisoners are only Nazis. But to Patty, a young Jewish girl with a turbulent home life, one boy in particular becomes an unlikely friend. Anton relates to Patty in ways that her mother and father never can. But when their forbidden relationship is discovered, will Patty risk her family and town for the understanding and love of one boy?
Hughes, Dean. Soldier Boys. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2003. ISBN-13: 9780689860218 790L
Spencer Morgan And Dieter Hedrick, one American, one German, are both young and eager to get into action in the war. Dieter, a shining member of the Hitler Youth movement, has actually met the Führer himself and was praised for his hard work. Now he is determined to make it to the front lines, to push back the enemy and defend the honor of the Fatherland. Spencer, just sixteen, must convince his father to sign his induction papers. He is bent on becoming a paratrooper -- the toughest soldiers in the world. He will prove to his family and hometown friends that he is more than the little guy with crooked teeth. He¹ll prove to his father that he can amount to something and keep his promises. Everyone will look at him differently when he returns home in his uniform, trousers tucked into his boots in the paratrooper style. Both boys get their wishes when they are tossed into intense conflict during the Battle of the Bulge. And both soon learn that war is about a lot more than proving oneself and one¹s bravery. Dean Hughes offers young readers a wrenching look at parallel lives and how innocence must eventually be shed.
Kadohata, Cynthia. Weedflower. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2009. ISBN-13: 9781416975663
Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. Now, other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor and Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new “home.” Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they’d been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend…. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both.
Klages, Ellen. The Green Glass Sea. Penguin Group. 2008. ISBN: 978-0-14241149-0.
It is 1943, and eleven-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is en route to New Mexico, to live with her mathematician father. Soon she arrives at a town that, officially, doesn't exist. It is called Los Alamos, and it is abuzz with activity, as scientists and mathematicians from all over America and Europe work on the biggest secret of all—"the gadget." None of them—not J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project; not the mathematicians and scientists; and least of all, Dewey—know how much "the gadget" is about to change their lives.
Nolan, Han. If I Should Die Before I Wake. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2003. ISBN-13: 9780152046798 840L
Can an alienated, Jew-hating, Neo-Nazi teenager have lived a previous life as a Polish Jewish girl in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust? Can a motorcycle accident which lands her comatose in a Jewish hospital be the vehicle for her tumbling through time repeatedly to relive that life while fighting for this one? Can her horrendous experiences of surviving but losing everything, including her family, and finally giving up her last food to another girl shake her out of the self-destructive life she has fashioned for herself here in the today world? This is an intriguing and touching story that weaves the terrible drama of the Nazis' destruction of an entire population together with the age-old belief in reincarnation and past lives.
Peet, Mal. Tamar. Candlewick Press. 2008. ISBN-13: 9780763640637
When her grandfather dies, Tamar inherits a box containing a series of clues and coded messages. Out of the past, another Tamar emerges, a man involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland half a century before. His story is one of passionate love, jealousy, and tragedy set against the daily fear and casual horror of the Second World War — and unraveling it is about to transform Tamar’s life forever.
Spinelli, Jerry. Milkweed. Random House Children's Books . 2005. ISBN-13: 9780440420057 510L
When readers first meet the orphan narrator, he is running. "Stop!" and Thief!" are words so familiar to him that he takes them as his name. Stopthief is one of a band of boys living on the streets and in the stables of Warsaw before the Nazi occupation. This devastating narrative follows his journey from the streets into the Ghetto and through the end of the war. Stopthief is renamed Misha by Uri, the leader of the orphan band, and told that he is a Russian gypsy, not a Jew. Misha is awestruck by the "Jackboots" who take over the city. After he is herded into the Jewish Ghetto, he steals food for his adopted family and the local orphanage. As conditions in the ghetto worsen, his ability to smuggle in and out of its walls turns him from thief to savior. Spinelli's works features more than one irrepressible hero who rises above the social confines of his or her day. In placing such a character in one of history's darkest hours, he challenges readers to see the Holocaust anew, to experience it in the moment. Misha is both insider and outsider, without history and without knowledge, and through his eyes the reader knows the disorientation, the confusion, and the mounting horror of a people who, unlike the modern reader, do not know what is to come. It is too simple to call him an archetype. His daring, part courage and part naïveté, comes at a cost, and only in the book's final chapters does one come to understand the price of his dissociation. Neither oppressor or oppressed, he is a tragic figure, ultimately alone despite his loyalty to Uri and to his adopted sister Janina.
Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust. Holiday House, Inc. 1988. ISBN-13: 9780823406975
Rogasky's graphic and moving chronicle of 20th-Century genocide in the western world tackles enormous questions of ethics, values, and history. She begins with an analysis of the roots of anti-Semitism, and sketches in how Hitler came to power. Then Rogasky details the dark horror of Nazismfrom the beginning pogroms the Nazis organized against German Jews to the setting up of concentration camps and death factories. She utilizes many primary sources’ personal narratives of victims and survivors and the records left by the Nazis to tell the story of mass murder. In clear and simple prose, she relates how the Jews lived and died in the camps, how they fought and prayed, how a few escaped, and how a small number of non-Jews helped them in their struggle. She concludes with an account of the Nuremburg Trials and the many instances of contemporary anti-Semitism that have outlived Hitler. Black-and-white photos, many of them vivid reminders of the genocide, underscore the dark events described.
Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Random House Children's Books. 2007. ISBN-13: 9780375842207
When Death tells a story, you pay attention. Liesel Meminger is a young girl growing up outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, and Death tells her story as "an attempt-a flying jump of an attempt-to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it." When her foster father helps her learn to read and she discovers the power of words, Liesel begins stealing books from Nazi book burnings and the mayor's wife's library. As she becomes a better reader, she becomes a writer, writing a book about her life in such a miserable time. Liesel's experiences move Death to say, "I am haunted by humans." How could the human race be "so ugly and so glorious" at the same time? This big, expansive novel is a leisurely working out of fate, of seemingly chance encounters and events that ultimately touch, like dominoes as they collide. The writing is elegant, philosophical and moving. Even at its length, it's a work to read slowly and savor. Beautiful and important.