Luba


Book Description

Barely twenty years old, Luba imagines a promising future in Kovna, Lithuania (present-day Kaunas). However, the year is 1939 and Luba is Jewish. Along with the whole Jewish community, her life changes inexplicably with the Nazi occupation. From her point of view, her “crime” is that she is Jewish and she will make her voice heard to her captors, knowing her chances of survival are slim. With candid urgency, she recounts the war years, her encounter with the commander of the camp where she is interned, and her miraculous survival against all odds.




Living among the Dead


Book Description

A treasure of individual strength, family love, community solidarity and Jewish History This is the story of one remarkable young woman's unimaginable journey through the rise of the Nazi regime, the Second World War, and the aftermath. Mania Lichtenstein’s dramatic story of survival is narrated by her granddaughter and her memories are interwoven with beautiful passages of poetry and personal reflection. Holocaust survivor Mania Lichtenstein used writing as a medium to deal with the traumatic effects of the war. Many Jews did not die in concentration camps, but were murdered in their lifelong communities, slaughtered by mass killing units, and then buried in pits. As a young girl, Mania witnessed the horrors while doing everything within her power to subsist. She lived in Włodzimierz, north of Lvov (Ukraine), was interned for three years in the labor camp nearby, managed to escape and hid in the forests until the end of the war. Although she was the sole survivor of her family, Mania went on to rebuild a new life in the United States, with a new language and new customs, always carrying with her the losses of her family and her memories. Seventy-five years after liberation, we are still witnessing acts of cruelty born out of hatred and discrimination. Living among the Dead reminds us of the beautiful communities that existed before WWII, the lives lost and those that lived on, and the importance to never forget these stories so that history does not repeat itself. READER'S FAVORITE GOLD MEDAL OF 2020 WINNER IN THE CATEGORY BIOGRAPHY




Jacob's Courage


Book Description

This book shows the critical roles that love, determination, and steadfast belief play toward battling one's demons both physically and mentally. Jacob's Courage is ultimately a tribute to the triumphant human spirit. - The Jewish Book Council Jacob's Courage is a poignant and powerful tale of love and bravery set against the harrowing backdrop of Nazi-occupied Austria. Follow the journey of two young Jews, Jacob and Rachael, as they navigate a world where innocence is ruthlessly destroyed. From their comfortable lives in Salzburg to a decrepit ghetto, from a prison camp where they secretly marry to their escape through a tunnel and their joining of the local partisans to fight the Nazis, their journey is both heart-wrenching and inspiring. But their courage is truly tested as they face the horrors of Auschwitz, where faith, love, and courage are their only allies. With unforgettable moments of chaste beauty, Jacob's Courage is a moving coming-of-age story that examines the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable brutality and genocide.







Shoes of the Shoah


Book Description




Living among the Dead


Book Description

An Educator’s Guide is now available to assist those teaching about the Holocaust by using the book, Living among the Dead. The Guide can be used chapter by chapter to enhance the student’s understanding of the narrative. There are multiple suggestions and lessons to take us deeper into the history of the Holocaust and this story of strength, family love, community solidarity, and Jewish history.







A Thousand Darknesses


Book Description

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.




Among the Reeds


Book Description

During the dark days of the Holocaust, a Jewish family struggles to survive When her son was born, Tammy Bottner experienced flashbacks of being hunted by the Nazis. The strange thing is, these experiences didn't happen to her. They happened to her grandmother decades earlier and thousands of miles away. Back in Belgium, Grandma Melly made unthinkable choices in order to save her family during WWII, including sending her two-year-old son, Bottner's father, into hiding in a lonely Belgian convent. Did the trauma that Tammy Bottner's predecessors experience affect their DNA? Did she inherit the "memories" of the war-time trauma in her very genes? In this moving family memoir, told partly from Melly's perspective, the author, a physician, recounts the saga of her family's experiences during the Holocaust. This tale, part history, part scientific reflection on epigenetics, takes the reader on a journey that may read like a novel, but is all the more fascinating for being true.




The Shoemaker's Son


Book Description

When the Soviet Union invaded Iwje, Poland in September 1939, David Bakszt's life was thrown into turmoil. His father's business was shuttered, his family was impoverished overnight, and his tight-knit community was disbanded. Though David did not know it at the time, a similar fate had befallen many Eastern European Jews, including the Silberfarb family in Serniki, Poland. Then, the Nazis arrived. From crowded ghettos and frigid forests to the battlefields on the Eastern Front, The Shoemaker's Son tells the true story of the Bakszts' and Silberfarbs' fights for survival, their struggles to rebuild in the aftermath, and the lives that they saved and lost in the process. Written by a third-generation survivor, this book provides a sober but loving account of her refugee family's extraordinary resistance efforts against the Nazis, the survivors' remarkable ability to embrace life amid so much death, and the indelible impact left on them and future generations.