Fiction
Mary Chamberlain
9780007591558
London, Spring 1939. 18-year-old Ada Vaughan, a beautiful and ambitious seamstress, has just started work for a modiste in Dover Street. A career in couture is hers for the taking - if only she can break free from the dreariness of family life in Lambeth. A chance meeting with the enigmatic Stanislaus von Lieben catapults Ada into a world of glamour and romance. When he suggests a trip to Paris, Ada is blind to all the warnings of war on the continent: this is her chance for a new start. Anticipation turns to despair when war is declared and the two are trapped in France. When the Nazis invade, Stanislaus abandons her and she is taken prisoner, sent to Germany as slave labour and forced to survive on her wits alone.
Heather Morris
9781785763670
This novel is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews, who survived Auschwitz and eventually made their home in Australia. In that terrible place, Lale was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival - literally scratching numbers into his fellow victims' arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.
Jennifer Rosner
9781529032475
Poland, 1941. Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, are the only surviving Jews in their town. They spend day and night hidden in a neighbour's barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother's stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head. Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether the best thing she can do for her daughter is keep her close by her side or give her the chance to survive by letting her go.
Antonio Iturbe
9781529104776
Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezin ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to smuggle past the guards, she agrees. And so, Dita becomes the secret librarian of Auschwitz, responsible for the safekeeping of the small collection of titles, as well as the 'living books' - prisoners of Auschwitz who know certain books so well, they too can be 'borrowed' to educate the children in the camp. But books are extremely dangerous. They make people think. And nowhere are they more dangerous than in Block 31 of Auschwitz, the children's block, where the slightest transgression can result in execution, no matter how young the transgressor.
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
9781788163415
This story was written on the eve of the Holocaust as a series of letters between an American Jew living in San Francisco and his former business partner and friend who returned to his native Germany.
Otto B Kraus
9781529105568
Alex Ehren is poet, a prisoner and a teacher in block 31 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the children's block. He spends his days trying to survive while illegally giving lessons to his young charges while shielding them as best he can from the impossible horrors of the camp. But trying to teach the children is not the only illicit activity that Alex is involved in. Alex is keeping a diary. Originally published as 'The Painted Wall', Otto Kraus's autobiographical novel, tells the true story of 500 Jewish children who lived in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau between September 1943 and June 1944.
Adiva Geffen
9781787465947
Shurka, her beloved husband and their two small children lived in a remote village in Poland. When WWII broke out, they believed the danger would never reach them, but they soon learned how wrong they were. Forced to flee their family home, they found shelter with their fellow Jews in the nearest ghetto but, every night, more and more people disappeared; taken away on trucks and to never be seen again. There were rumours of camps at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau and, the longer the family stayed in the ghetto, the sooner those camps would become a horrifying reality. Escaping into the forest was their best hope of surviving the Holocaust. There, the family, along with Jewish resistance fighters, tried to hide from the Nazi soldiers who hunted them. This new life would test them more than they ever thought possible. Even in the dark, hope can be found. The novel is based on an incredible true story.
Heather Morris
978178576907
Her beauty saved her life - and condemned her. Cilka is just 16 years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, in 1942. The Commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair, and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival. After liberation, she is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to Siberia. But what choice did she have? And where did the lines of morality lie for Cilka, who was sent to Auschwitz when still a child? In a Siberian prison camp, she faces challenges both new and horribly familiar, including the unwanted attention of the guards. But when she makes an impression on a woman doctor, Cilka is taken under her wing. Cilka begins to tend to the ill in the camp, struggling to care for them under brutal conditions.
Malka Adler
9780008386122
This is a story about a family separated by the Holocaust and their harrowing journey back to each other. Dov and Yitzhak live in a small village in the mountains of Hungary, isolated both from the world and from the horrors of the war. But one day in 1944, everything changes. The Nazis storm the homes of the Jewish villagers and inform them they have one hour. One hour before the train will take them to Auschwitz. Six decades later, from the safety of their living rooms at home in Israel, the brothers finally break their silence to a friend who will never let their stories be forgotten.
Rory Clements
9781838777678
Germany, late summer 1945. The war is over, but the country is in ruins. Millions of refugees and holocaust survivors strive to rebuild their lives in displaced persons camps. Millions of German soldiers and SS men are held captive in primitive conditions in open-air detention centres. Everywhere, civilians are desperate for food and shelter. No one admits to having voted Nazi, yet many are unrepentant. Adolf Hitler is said to have killed himself in his Berlin bunker. But no body was found - and many people believe he is alive. Newspapers are full of stories reporting sightings and theories. Even Stalin, whose own troops captured the bunker, has told President Truman he believes the former Fuhrer is not dead. Day by day, American and British intelligence officers subject senior members of the Nazi regime to gruelling interrogation in their quest for their truth.
Oriana Ramunno
9780008495572
A young Jewish prisoner. Auschwitz, 1943. It's snowing outside and Block 10 looks even bleaker than usual. Gioele Errera, a young Jewish boy imprisoned in the camp, finds the body of an SS officer. A detective with everything to prove. Hugo Fischer is sent to investigate the unexplained death of the renowned Nazi. But Hugo is hiding a secret - he is suffering from a degenerative disease. The only way for him to survive is to give his support to the Reich and hide his condition. A confrontation with pure evil. In Auschwitz, Hugo comes face to face not only with a complex murder, but with a truth - that of the Final Solution. And he is forced to decide what is most important to him - and who, if anyone, he should try to save.
Non-Fiction
The dressmakers of Auschwitz: the true story of the women who sewed to survive
Lucy Adlington
9781444849615
At the height of the Holocaust, 25 young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were selected to design, cut and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop - called the Upper Tailoring Studio - was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant's wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz and for ladies from Nazi Berlin's upper crust. Drawing on diverse sources - including interviews with the last surviving seamstress - 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz' follows the fates of these brave women.
Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
9781529073447
When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he'd written 'Good luck and happiness'. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz, she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance. In 'Lily's Promise' she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe.
Daniel Finkelstein
9780008483890
From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father's devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.
The escape artist: the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world
Jonathan Freedland
9781529369069
In April 1944 a teenager named Rudolf Vrba was planning a daring and unprecedented escape from Auschwitz. After hiding in a pile of timber planks for three days while 3000 SS men and their bloodhounds searched for him, Vrba and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler would eventually cross Nazi-occupied Poland on foot, as penniless fugitives. Their mission: to tell the world the truth of the Final Solution. A thrilling history with enormous historical implications, 'The Escape Artist' tells the extraordinary story of a complex man who would seek escape again and again: first from Auschwitz, then from his past, even from his own name.
Malka Levine
978103502008
'A Mother's Courage' is Holocaust survivor Malka Levine's powerful and moving tribute to a determined and resourceful woman who refused to give up hope so long as her children needed her.
Simon May
9781529042863
The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler's Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish. 'How to Be a Refugee' is Simon May's account of how three sisters - his mother and his two aunts - grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing 'Aryan' status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler's regime, and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.
Paul Brickhill
9780753156889
The Story that inspired the classic film, how more than 600 men in a German Prisoner of War camp worked together to achieve an extraordinary daring break-out.
Do the birds still sing in hell?
Horace Greasley
9781782192275
Horace ‘Jim’ Greasley was 20 years old in the Spring of when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Horace’s war didn’t last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a 10-week march across France and Belgium en route to Holland. Horace survived – barely. After a three-day train journey without food and water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl interpreting for his captors.