World War II

The Cage is the 1986 memoir of Ruth Minsky Sender, nee Riva Minska, detailing her family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust. Born in Lodz, Poland, Riva inhabits a close-knit community that integrates both Jews and non-Jews through shared traditions and intergenerational spaces. When Hitler’s Nazis invade Poland, thirteen-year-old Riva watches this peace crumble, as non-Jewish friends accept her family’s persecution and as Jews themselves adopt positions of power that hurt others in the community.After Riva’s... Read The Cage Summary

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Jane Yolen is the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic, a novel for young readers (1988). The main character, Hannah Stern, is almost 13 at the start of the novel. The story begins in her present, the late 1980s, and then travels back in time to 1942. The novel straddles multiple genres: fantasy, time slip, and historical fiction. Stern experiences the tragic history of the Holocaust, and Yolen uses her knowledge of history to provide accurate... Read The Devil's Arithmetic Summary

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Written between 1942 and 1944, The Diary of Anne Frank, aka The Diary of a Young Girl, is a collection of journal entries by Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, while in hiding with her family for two years in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. When Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, her diary was given to her father, Otto Frank, the only known survivor of the family. The diary was first published... Read The Diary of a Young Girl Summary

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First published in Italy in 1986 as I sommersi e i salvati, The Drowned and the Saved, is a collection of eight essays by Primo Levi about his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The book was translated into English in 1988 by Raymond Rosenthal. Some critics categorize The Drowned and the Saved as a memoir, while others believe it to be an autobiography; still other critics name this book a treatise in which... Read The Drowned and the Saved Summary

The Endless Steppe is a young adult memoir in which Esther Hautzig, the author, details her five-year exile in Siberia, from June 1941 to March 1946. When the American politician and diplomat Adlai E. Stevenson visited the village of Rubtsovsk and wrote about it, Esther Hautzig wrote to him to tell him about her time living there. Stevenson suggested that Esther write about her experience. Published in 1968, during the Cold War, the book resonated... Read The Endless Steppe Summary

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The English Patient (1992) is a historical romance novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. The novel explores the relationships between four dissimilar people living in an abandoned Italian monastery at the end of World War II. The eponymous English patient—actually a Hungarian count burned beyond recognition—tells Canadian nurse Hana the story of his forbidden romance with British amateur cartographer Katharine Clifton as their small team attempted, several years earlier, to map North African deserts. Using... Read The English Patient Summary

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The German Girl is a historical novel written by Cuban journalist and editor Armando Lucas Correa. It interweaves the stories of Anna Rosen, a 12-year-old girl living in New York in 2014, and Hannah Rosenthal, her great aunt, whose journey begins as a 12-year-old Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Berlin in 1939. Anna’s story revolves around a trip to Cuba to visit her great aunt Hannah, while Hannah’s story primarily centers around her journey onboard... Read The German Girl Summary