"When the German army occupied Holland in 1940, Annie was only eight years old. Because she was Jewish, the occupation put her in grave danger. Most people thought the war wouldn't last long, but Annie knew that if she wanted to stay alive, she would have to go into hiding. Fortunately, a Gentile family, the Oostervelds, offered refuge to Annie and her older sister, Sini. For two years they hid in the cramped upstairs room of the Oostervelds's remote...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in "drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust" (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting...

In the summer of 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank found herself hiding with her family in the cramped attic of an old office building in Amsterdam. Outside, Jews all over Europe were being thrown into concentration camps. Exiled from the outside world, the Frankfurt family battled hunger, boredom, confinement, and the ever-looming threat of discovery and death. As the second World War continued to rage, Anne turned to her diary and documented everything....

As a young adult in wartime Vienna, Georg Rauch helped his mother hide dozens of Jews from the Gestapo behind false walls in their top-floor apartment and arrange for their safe transport out of the country. His family was among the few who worked underground to resist Nazi rule. Then came the day he was drafted into Hitlers army and shipped out to fight on the Eastern front as part of the German infantry - in spite of his having confessed his own...

"In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless, and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille helping...

This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems-the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the years before World War II. Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella-simple, pious, hard-working-this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We...

Autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Contains three works of Holocaust literature, including "Night," an account of the author's experiences as a boy at Auschwitz; "Dawn," a short novel about a young Palestinian terrorist who spends the night waiting to execute a British prisoner; and "The Accident," the story of a Holocaust survivor who must choose whether to live or die after being hit by a car.--Publisher's...

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from--a Jew. This encounter and the moral dilemma it posed raise fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of forgiveness. Must we, can we forgive the repentant criminal? Can we forgive...