Washoe County Library System

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors. The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller that is now a major motion picture, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding...

In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for over two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarismbut also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking...

""Reading Georgia Hunter's We Were the Lucky Ones is like being swung heart first into history. A brave and mesmerizing debut, and a truly tremendous accomplishment."--Paula McLain, New York Timesbestselling author of The Paris Wife. An extraordinary, propulsive novel based on the true story of a family of Polish Jews who scatter at the start of the Second World War, determined to survive, and to reunite. It is the spring of 1939, and three generations...

Sixteen-year-old Noa, forced to give up her baby fathered by a Nazi soldier, snatches a child from a boxcar containing Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp and takes refuge with a traveling circus, where Astrid, a Jewish aerialist, becomes her mentor.

"As the frightening impact of World War II creeps closer and closer to her door, eleven-year-old Ada learns to manage life on the home front"--

"Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation...Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village...Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam--a Jew--but Helena’s concern for the American grows into something much deeper...[as] Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy...

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest

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"Leipzig, 1930's Germany. Hetty Herta is a young girl growing up under Nazi rule. With an SS officer father, a brother in the Luftwaffe and a member of the BDM Hetty is the epitome of a perfect German child. But Walter changes everything. Blond haired, blue-eyed, perfect in every way Walter. The boy who saved her life when she was a young child. Her brother's childhood best friend. A Jew. As she falls more and more in love with a man who is against...

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerfully imagined novel . . . [a] profoundly moving book that engages the heights and depths of human experience.”—Los Angeles Times
It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany...