Concentration camps

The Fighter

Fighting is a way of life for Moshe Wisniak. As a boy from a very poor neighborhood in Warsaw, he can’t run away when Polish kids attack the Jews, because his legs are weak. So he learns to use his fists, his head and other weapons to defend himself and his brothers. When the family moves to Paris in 1929, everyone finds work and life improves slowly. Moshe, now Maurice, is a leather worker and a young husband. At a Jewish sports club, he takes up boxing, and becomes an amateur flyweight. But the war comes to Paris, and by 1942, the French police round up foreign Jews and the Germans deport them by the hundreds every day. They send Maurice to the death camp at Auschwitz. In the camp, SS officers sense Maurice’s strength. They command him to box against a dying prisoner. Now Maurice is faced with an impossible moral dilemma: kill the prisoner or be killed by the SS for refusing to obey them. Translated from French by award-winning author Jean-Jacques Greif, The Fighter isn’t simply another book about the Holocaust. It is a book about a hero who discovers the death-defying power of his own humanity.

Take a closer look at The Fighter as examined in WOW Review.

Night

A candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets our capacity for inhumanity. More than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, this memoir addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Thanks to My Mother

Susie Weksler was only eight in 1941 when Hitler’s forces invaded her Lithuanian city of Vilnius, a great center for Jewish learning and culture. Soon her family would face hunger and fear in the Jewish ghetto – but worse was to come. When the ghetto was liquidated, some Jews were selected for forced labor camps; the rest were killed. Susie would live – because of the courage and ingenuity of her mother. It was her mother who carried Susie, hidden in a backpack, to the group destined for the labor camps; who disguised her as an adult in makeup and turban to fool the camp guards; who fed her body and soul through gruesome conditions in three concentration camps and a winter “death march”; who showed her the power of the human spirit to endure.

Fireflies In The Dark

The story of Friedl Dicker-Brandies and the children of Terezin covers the years during which Friedl Dicker, a Jewish woman from Czechoslavakia, taught art to children at the Terezin Concentration Camp. includes art created by teacher and students, excerpts from diaries, and interviews with camp survivors.

Kanada

During World War II, life for Jutka, a Hungarian Jew and her family are transported to Auschwitz, where her mother and grandmother perish. Dreams of Canada, inspired by a book from a Canadian relative, sustain her. After the liberation, Jutka falls in love with Sandor, who dreams of relocating to Israel.

Surviving Hitler

Caught up in Hitler’s Final Solution to annihilate Europe’s Jews, 15-year-old Jack is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps. Jack forges friendships with other prisoners, and together they struggle to make it one more days.