Washoe County Library System

"Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis never told a lie. When the Nazi’s invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading to “new homes” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures...

""O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her." Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderlyprofessor of philosophy Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police "don't interfere in such minor matters." What happens to...

"On his deathbed, Dr. Joanne Intrator's father poses two unsettling questions: "Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?" Joanne soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade is to pass before she will fully come to grasp why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did. Repeatedly, Joanne's restitution quest brings her...

""Both heartbreaking and life-affirming" (Edith Eger, author of The Choice), the long-awaited memoir of Holocaust survivor Hannah Pick-Goslar, who shares an intimate look into her life and friendship with Anne Frank. In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable...

"Medallions is a collection of eight documentary stories originally published in Poland in 1946 that recount Nazi war crimes under the German occupation of the country. The author, Zofia Nalkowska, was a member of a special committee for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland, and the stories reflect facts she learned from victims and witnesses to atrocities inflicted on Polish civilians. Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature,...

"Notes from the Valley of Slaughter is an eyewitness journal and diary of the Holocaust, written in the ghetto of Šiauliai, Lithuania, by Dr. Aharon Pick (1872–1944). A physician, scholar, and community leader, Pick was a keen observer of the hardships of ghetto life, and his journal represents a detailed account of the tragic events he witnessed as well as a sensitive, almost poetic personal testament. Pick's journal covers the tumultuous...

The only way you'll leave Auschwitz is through the chimney. The words still rang in Agnes Markx's head as she left the Judenramp and the hive of activity around the train behind. As a nurse assigned to Block 10, she realizes the stories of the horrors transpiring here weren't exaggerated. Now an unwilling accomplice in the Nazi doctors' medical experiments, she vows to save as many women under her care as possible.

For the Jewish people, the span of years from 1933-1945, represents one of the most devastating in their three-thousand year history. It is often called in Hebrew Shoah, which is best translated as "devastation." The Roma and Sinti peoples named it the Porrajmos, the "great devouring." In English it has come to be referred to as the Holocaust, an expression that implies not only the utter terror and destruction of that time but the uniqueness of the...

"The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland under Nazi occupation who finds refuge in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author's grandparents Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: a young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over...

"The Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag provide the context for this acclaimed examination of the human capacity for moral life. Drawing on a striking array of documents, Tzvetan Todorov reconstructs a vivid portrait of the conduct of those who ran the camps and those who suffered their outrages. Challenging the widespread view that moral life was extinguished in the extreme circumstances of the camps, he uncovers instead a rich moral universe,...