I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust
By Livia Bitton-Jackson
Published: 1997
Awards:
ALA Best Books for Young Adults - Nonfiction (1998)
Christopher Award - Books for Young People (1998)
Sequoyah Book Award - Young Adults (2000)
Sydney Taylor - Honor Award for Older Readers (1998)
This autobiography, written 50 years after the Holocaust, follows the events of the author’s 13-year-old self, as she and her family are forced into a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia, then transported to Auschwitz. Separated from her father and brother, Elli and her mother find strength in one another as they work together, sometimes narrowly avoiding the gas chambers, to survive.
Published: 1997
Awards:
ALA Best Books for Young Adults - Nonfiction (1998)
Christopher Award - Books for Young People (1998)
Sequoyah Book Award - Young Adults (2000)
Sydney Taylor - Honor Award for Older Readers (1998)
This autobiography, written 50 years after the Holocaust, follows the events of the author’s 13-year-old self, as she and her family are forced into a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia, then transported to Auschwitz. Separated from her father and brother, Elli and her mother find strength in one another as they work together, sometimes narrowly avoiding the gas chambers, to survive.
Reviews:
“Hers is a story of unimaginable brutality, but also of faith, hope, and courage, exemplified by her closing message: Never give up” (Berman).
We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust
By Jacob Boas
Published: 1995
Many people kept diaries of their life under Nazi rule; unfortunately, not all of these (people and diaries) survived the wave of anti-Semitism. The five writers included in this collection did not survive the Holocaust, but their words reveal wisdom seemingly beyond their years, as they discovered something within their own souls that many adults are still searching for. These teenagers, living in ghettos, villages, or hiding places across Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, and Holland are a haunting and moving testament to the horrors inflicted upon millions.
Published: 1995
Many people kept diaries of their life under Nazi rule; unfortunately, not all of these (people and diaries) survived the wave of anti-Semitism. The five writers included in this collection did not survive the Holocaust, but their words reveal wisdom seemingly beyond their years, as they discovered something within their own souls that many adults are still searching for. These teenagers, living in ghettos, villages, or hiding places across Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, and Holland are a haunting and moving testament to the horrors inflicted upon millions.
Reviews:
“Born in 1943 in the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland, Boas here brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary… The young writers relay their hopes and fears even as they chronicle the disintegration of their daily lives. One is religious, another politically active, others wrapped up in their families--Boas points out each writer's sensitivities as he explains the terrible traps into which the individual teenagers fall. In exploring their fates, he impresses upon the reader their vitality, and, by extension, implies the enormity of the Holocaust's losses” ("We").
The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible...on Schindler's List
By Leon Leyson, with Marilyn J. Harran & Elizabeth B. Leyson
Published: 2013
Awards:
ALA Notable Children’s Book (2014)
Amazon.com Best Books for Children & Teens – Ages 9-12: Middle Graders (2013)
Christopher Award, Books for Young People (2014)
Cybils Award Finalist – Young Adult Nonfiction (2013)
Great Lakes Great Books Master List – Nominee (winners not yet announced)
Sydney Taylor Honor Award for Older Readers (2014)
Texas Lone Star Reading List
Many people have heard of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi who risked his life to rescue 1100 Jews. Leon Leyson, born Leib Lejzon, was the youngest of those saved by Schindler’s actions. Leon calls himself “an unlikely survivor of the Holocaust” because “I was just a boy; I had no connections; I had no skills. But I had one factor in my factor that trumped everything else: Oskar Schindler thought my life had value. He thought I was worth saving, even when giving me a chance to live put his own life in peril” (3). Leon’s memoir begins at a reunion with Schindler and other people from the list, and then journeys back to his early childhood in the rural village of Narewka, Poland, where he lived with his parents and four siblings in a two-room house. When he was eight years old, his father’s job relocated the family to Kraków, Poland. After the Germans invaded in September 1939, life for the Lejzon family, along with millions of other Jews, was drastically different. It was simply by chance that Leon’s father met and became employed by Schindler, but that chance meeting is why Leon is able to tell his story today. This moving testimony takes us through Leon’s experiences in the ghetto in Kraków, Płaszow Concentration Camp, Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, and finally Schindler’s munitions factory in Brünnlitz.
The Cage
By Ruth Minsky Sender
Published: 1986
Awards:
CBC/NCSS Notable Children’s Book in Social Studies
IRA Teachers’ Choice
Merit of Distinction Citation from the International Center for Holocaust Studies of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith
Riva is 13 when the Germans invade Poland in 1939. For a few years, she, her mother, and her three brothers live in the Lodz ghetto in their own home, but their belongings are taken from them by people who used to be their friends. In 1944, when almost all of the food is gone from the ghetto, Riva and her family join the transports to labor camps, in hopes of food and warmth. At Auschwitz, Riva is separated from her brothers, and she is later sent to Mittelsteine labor camp, where her poetry gives hope to her fellow prisoners. The Cage tells her story: a story of the cages of the ghetto and the concentration camps; but it is also a story of hope, for “if hope is lost, all is lost” (Sender 134).
Published: 1986
Awards:
CBC/NCSS Notable Children’s Book in Social Studies
IRA Teachers’ Choice
Merit of Distinction Citation from the International Center for Holocaust Studies of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith
Riva is 13 when the Germans invade Poland in 1939. For a few years, she, her mother, and her three brothers live in the Lodz ghetto in their own home, but their belongings are taken from them by people who used to be their friends. In 1944, when almost all of the food is gone from the ghetto, Riva and her family join the transports to labor camps, in hopes of food and warmth. At Auschwitz, Riva is separated from her brothers, and she is later sent to Mittelsteine labor camp, where her poetry gives hope to her fellow prisoners. The Cage tells her story: a story of the cages of the ghetto and the concentration camps; but it is also a story of hope, for “if hope is lost, all is lost” (Sender 134).