Harrowing and heroic, stories about the Holocaust outlive the march of time. These books are available to borrow from the Lititz Public Library.
The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa During the Nuremberg Trials by Christiane Kohl
For three years during the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal, the American military operated an inn that hosted both defense and prosecution witnesses.
The Heavens are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod by Avrom Bendavid-Val
A specialist in economic development revisits his father’s Ukrainian hometown of Trochenbrod, once a thriving center for commerce and home of 6,000 people that was destroyed by the Nazis in 1944, leaving only 60 survivors.
The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh
Interviews share the accounts of more than 150 American, British and Canadian soldiers who encountered the horrors of the death and slave labor camps, often by accident on their way to another military objective.
Two Rings: A Story of Love and War by Millie Werber and Eve Keller
Living in Nazi-occupied Poland, Werber faced death multiple times as an armament factory slave laborer and Auschwitz survivor. In this book she traces her brief and beautiful marriage to a first husband who did not survive the war.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Sonia Taitz
The author is the daughter of two concentration camp survivors, a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison and his wife, a concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power.
Emissary of the Doomed: Bargaining for Lives in the Holocaust by Ronald Florence
Although the Jewish Rescue Committee assumed that the Jews of America and Britain could influence others to provide funds for a rescue of the Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz, the negotiations stalled and fatal deportations began.
The Boy: A Holocaust Story by Dan Porat
Haunted by a photograph of a terrified child facing the raised guns of SS soldiers during World War II, a university professor began a search that produced surprising results.
Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry by Livia Bitton-Jackson
A woman recounts her journey to her family’s hometown in Slovakia to exhume the bodies of her grandparents from a Jewish cemetery that would soon be flooded by a new dam on the Danube River.
Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, A Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II by Ram Oren
A Catholic nanny finding herself the guardian of a three-year-old Jewish child promised the boy’s mother that she would get him safely out of Poland.
The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope and Survival in Theresienstadt by Hannelore Brenner
Using preserved diaries, art, music, poetry and photographs, the author chronicles the stories of ten girls who survived the children’s barracks of Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival by Clara Kramer
The president of the Holocaust Resource Foundation recounts her life as a frightened, hungry teenager who, along with her family, was rescued by righteous gentiles.
Originally published on February 1, 2013 in the Lititz Record Express.