In 1940, Anna Hirsch and her family are captured by the Nazis and deported to a refugee camp in the south of France. The children held in the camp are sent to Le Chambon, a tiny village whose citizens have agreed to care for deported children. There, in the face of escalating dominance and threats from the Nazi party, the good people of Le Chambon protect the refugees.
When the Nazis invade Poland, nothing is safe anymore. Ten-year-old Sarah and her family must leave their home and live in a Jewish ghetto surrounded by barbed wire. There, life is a nightmare of cold and hunger where Nazi soldiers kill Jews at will. But Sarah still hears stories that give her hope–stories about a man who lives in the nearby forest, fighting the Nazis and sheltering the Jews. Sarah’s brother thinks they should try to escape to the forest. Her parents think they will be safer where they are. Sarah doesn’t know who is right. But as life in the ghetto grows worse and worse, the forest may be their only hope. Based on a true story of life during the Holocaust, this is a heartrending novel of one family’s struggle to survive.
Piri is a city girl, but every year she goes to visit her grandmother Babi on her farm in the Ukrainian village of Komjaty. There is a lot that Piri finds strange, even scary, in Komjaty, such as the ghost in the form of a rooster who supposedly haunts the cemetery! But Piri loves country life: making corn bread, eating plums right off the tree, venturing out with her grandmother in the early morning to hunt for mushrooms. And during her time with Babi, Piri learns lessons that will stay with her all of her life, about the importance of honest hard work, of caring for the less fortunate, and of having the courage to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. In these nine stories, Aranka Siegal paints a tender portrait of the love between a grandmother and granddaughter, inspired by her own experiences with her grandmother.
A little boy says the Sh’ma before he goes to bed. The prayer is provided in both Hebrew and English.
Depicting the history of Israel from biblical Abraham to the present, this sophisticated, four-color graphic adaptation is academically grounded, guiding readers through highlights both in historical detail and from Israel’s world view. History, religion, politics, and the current Middle East situation are all given comprehensive coverage in the text, which opens in a university setting with a professor teaching a series of sessions on Middle East/Near East modern history, beginning with Israel. With painted art that jumps right off the page, this crash course is an absorbing way for readers to absorb, understand, and retain key information about 4,000 years of complicated history.
During the days of Nazi terror in Europe, many Jewish children were taken from their families and hidden. Régine Miller was one such child, who left her mother, father, and brother when she was 10 years old. Utterly alone as she is shunted from place to place, told to tell no one she is Jewish, she hears that her mother and brother have been taken by the SS, the German secret police. Only her desperate hope that her father will return sustains her. At war’s end she must learn to live with the terrible truth of “the final solution,” the Nazi’s extermination camps. The people who sheltered Régine cover a wide spectrum of human types, ranging from callous to kind, fearful to defiant, exploitive to caring. This is a story of a brave girl and an equally brave woman to tell the story so many years later.
For David Nathan, Copenhagen is the most beautiful city in the world, even with Nazis in the streets. But life has changed since the soldiers arrived. His parents are always worried. And his older sister goes to school early and comes home late. Sometimes she doesn’t come home at all! David’s father is a baker, and since the war began, butter and cream are very hard to find. So David is amazed when his father makes a “special order” of cream-filled chocolate eclairs. But when no one comes to pick up the eclairs, David is asked to run a very special errand. It’s an errand that will change his life forever.
One night, the Great Freddie, a young ventriloquist, is possessed by a dybbuk, a Jewish spirit. The dybbuk is a scrappy demon who glows as if spray-painted by moonlight. The dybbuk is revealed to be the ghost of a twelve-year-old boy named Avrom Amos, a victim of the Nazis during World War II. In a plucky scheme to seek revenge, he commandeers The Great Freddie’s stage act and entraps the entertainer in the postwar ashes of Germany. Behind the footlights, the dybbuk lights up the terrible fate of a million and a half Jewish children, including Avrom himself.
In an attempt to save his daughter’s life, Eva’s father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her sister survive the war.
Yulek, a seventeen-year-old Holocaust survivor, finds himself tragically alone at war’s end. Hoping to begin again, he makes his way to Palestine, where he meets a sad and beautiful Jewish girl named Theresa. Saved from the Nazis by Catholic nuns, Theresa, like Yulek, is uncertain about her place in the postwar world. Together they struggle to rediscover the joy of living. Meanwhile, a mysterious English woman sets out on her own search for the long-lost nephew that she has spotted in a newspaper photo of Jewish refugees. Perhaps by finding him, she will also find some long-hidden part of herself.