David Newman’s gifts as a musician and a teacher carried him through years of brutality during the war. Torn from his family in Poland and deported for forced labour at Skarzysko- Kamienna, David battled desperation and the mounting death toll by writing songs, poems and satires about life in the camp. Later, in the infamous Buchenwald camp, the …

Transnistria, Romania, did not exist on a map. Yet that is where ten-year-old Felicia Steigman and her parents arrived in 1941, after a cruel deportation and death march overseen by Romanian Nazi collaborators. After surviving three years amid squalor, devastation and death, they finally returned to their pre-war idyllic hometown, Vatra Dornei, onl …

Kati and her younger sister, Ilonka, arrived in Canada with painful memories from the Holocaust, which took both of their parents. Their harrowing time alone in the Budapest ghetto was fresh in their minds, as were their fragile hopes to be adopted. But their lives in Toronto were far from what they expected, and full of broken promises. As the sis …

When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, fifteen-year-old Miklos Friedman drew on his wits to survive. Recruited into forced labour, sent to a ghetto and, ultimately, to the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Mühldorf, Miklos never stopped fighting to change his fate. After the war, he risked everything in order to leave his past behind. Decades later, a c …

From the bustling city of Paris to the quaint, countryside village of Champlost, France, Where Courage Lives follows ten-year-old Muguette Szpajzer and her family as they sought refuge from the war. Written in vignettes with child-like charm and innocence, Muguette’s memoir provides rich insight into rural life during wartime upheaval, honouring …

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, …

Bronia and Josio (Joseph) grew up in Kozowa, a shtetl filled with lively culture, eccentric characters and extended family. When Bronia met Josio, she was charmed by his confidence and fearlessness. Separated when Josio was drafted into the army, reunited amid the chaos of war, their connection endured as their persecution intensified. When everyth …

When the Nazis invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel thought only about how to save “her” children as she accompanied them all the way to Auschwitz. Her account of living and surviving in the camp is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the …

Almost forty years after the end of the end of the war, Claire Baum opens a package from a stranger in Rotterdam, unleashing a flood of repressed memories from her childhood. As Claire delves into her past, she uncovers the personal sacrifice and bravery of her parents, the Dutch resistance and the families that selflessly gave shelter to her and h …

Ten-year-old Steve Rotschild learns to hide, to be silent, to be still – and to wait. He knows the sound of the Nazis’ army boots and knows to hold his breath until their footsteps recede. Rotschild takes us on a captivating journey through his wartime childhood in Vilna, eloquently juxtaposing his past, furtive walks outside the ghetto with hi …

Arthur Ney, a twelve-year-old smuggler outside the Warsaw ghetto walls when the ghetto uprising began in the spring of 1943, fled to the countryside with false papers to work on a farm. Almost a year later, he returned to Warsaw and faced the realization that his family was gone. Under the protection of the Salesian Fathers as a “Christian” boy …

In June 1942, when twelve-year-old Gerta is deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto – the Nazis' deceptive "model Jewish settlement" – her family helps her cope with the surrounding devastation. Later, alone in Auschwitz, Gerta is determined to survive the unbearable. Her intrepid spirit and keen observation guides her anew throu …

When 17-year-old Leslie Meisels insisted that his mother and two brothers join a transport leaving Debrecen, Hungary, to go who knows where, that decision luckily put them among the roughly 20,000 “exchange Jews” whose lives had been bartered for cash and military equipment in a secret deal with Adolf Eichmann.

Nearly buried alive, ten-year-old Michael Kutz narrowly escaped the Nazi death squad that killed 4,000 Jews, including his own family, in his hometown of Nies´wiez?. Guided by his mother’s last words and determined to survive, he became the youngest member of a partisan resistance group in the dense Belorussian forest, and took part in daring op …

A month before George Stern’s thirteenth birthday, Germany invaded his native Hungary, anti-Jewish edicts were passed and a ghetto was established. A rebel even then, George refused to wear the Jewish star. “Passing” as a Christian boy, he survived the siege of Budapest as the Soviet Red Army pressed closer, strafing the city while the fascis …

With these last words from their mother, two little girls, Marguerite and her older sister, Henriette, started a long and wandering journey that lasted three years. Given new identities, they had to forget everything about their former, familiar lives. Taken from farms to convents, they learned how to remain silent, to pretend, to lie in order to s …

Elsa Thon was a sixteen-year-old photographer's apprentice when the Nazis occupied her town of Pruszków, Poland. When her family was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, Elsa joined a community farm and was recruited by the Underground. Despite her deep belief in destiny, Elsa refused to bow to her fate as a Jew in war-torn Poland.

At fifteen, Felix Opatowski begins smuggling goods out of the Lodz ghetto in exchange for food. In 1943 he is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he is recruited as a runner for the Polish Underground and implicated in the plot to blow up the crematoria.

An only child, fifteen-year-old Zuzana Sermer did what she could to protect her father and ailing mother when the Nazis set up a fascist regime in her native Slovakia in 1939. Four years later, after fleeing to the supposed safety of Budapest, Zuzana and her fiancé, Arthur, instead navigated one treacherous situation after another. Survival Kit is …

When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zdun´ska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. Afte …

For six desperate years, Willie Sterner’s skill as a painter saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis. Faced with inhumane conditions in slave labour camps and grieving the loss of his close-knit family, Sterner relied on courage and ingenuity to hold onto his dignity. Through almost random luck, he came under the protection of the famed Os …

As Hitler’s army swept into Czechoslovakia in 1939, Anka Voticky, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, her husband, Arnold, and her family fled halfway around the world to an unlikely refuge – the Chinese port of Shanghai. Estranged from all that was familiar, their security was threatened yet again when the Japanese occupying the city forced …

Hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Slovakia’s Low Tatra Mountains in the fall of 1944, in constant danger from the Germans occupying nearby villages, fourteen-year-old Agnes Grossmann and her family made the daring decision to escape high into the mountains and hike along treacherous ice-covered peaks to safety. Twenty-four years later, Agne …

Two Jewish girls born six months apart – Judit Grünfeld (Judy Abrams) in Hungary and Eva Felsenburg (Marx) in Czechoslovakia – are separated from their parents and forced to "pass" as Christian children. Theirs are the amazingly parallel but unique stories of two children who were able to survive when so many others perished.

On the run in Nazi-occupied Poland, thirteen-year-old orphan Marian Finkelman — later Domanski — was forced to grow up much too early. When he finally escaped the ghetto in his hometown, Marian’s perfect Polish and fair complexion helped him narrowly escape death as he travelled through the Polish countryside.

Not quite two when he immigrated to Canada, Max Bornstein returned to Europe in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler came to power. Barely surviving as a stateless refugee in 1930s Paris, he escaped France when it fell to the Nazis only to be interned in a Spanish concentration camp.

William Tannenzapf never wavered in his determination to survive and save his wife and baby girl from the evil that gripped his home town of Stanislawów. Blond, cherubic, Renate Krakauer was a “miracle baby” born as the world descended into war and soon surrounded by misery and death. Starved and enslaved, Tannenzapf entrusted his daughter to …

Under the Yellow & Red Stars is a remarkable story of survival, coming of age and homecoming after years as a stranger in a strange land. Alex Levin was only ten years old when he ran deep into the forest after the Germans invaded his hometown of Rokitno and only twelve when he emerged from hiding to find that he had neither parents nor a community …

Under the Yellow & Red Stars is a remarkable story of survival, coming of age and homecoming after years as a stranger in a strange land. Alex Levin was only ten years old when he ran deep into the forest after the Germans invaded his hometown of Rokitno and only twelve when he emerged from hiding to find that he had neither parents nor a community …

The son of an Antwerp diamond merchant, Paul-Henri Rips was ten when the Nazis invaded Belgium and ended his “golden childhood” forever. Guided by his father’s admonition to “Sei a mensch” (Be a decent person), Rips managed to hold onto his humanity in the face of unfathomable inhumanity.

Rachel Milbauer, a vivacious and outgoing music lover, hid silently in an underground bunker in Nazi-occupied Poland for nearly two years. After the war, a recovered violin, case and photos hidden away by Rachel’s beloved Uncle Velvel became cherished symbols of survival and continuity. Saved by inner fortitude, luck and the courage and caring of …

Nineteen-year-old Tommy Dick was killed, only to resurface. Born into a Hungarian family who had converted from Judaism, Tommy soon found out that in the eyes of the Nazis, he was still a Jew, still a target for murder. On the run and in disguise, Tommy was chased by death as much as he was by luck. Getting Out Alive is a vivid and gripping account …

A young boy who loved soccer as much as he loved to write, John Freund found his joyful childhood shattered by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. John’s family suffered through the systematic erosion of their rights only to be deported to Theresienstadt – en route to the Auschwitz death camp.

Lodz, Poland, 1944. Teenaged Henia Rosenfarb sat with her family in a small, secret room, hiding from Nazi soldiers who were looking for them. Little could the fiery redhead have imagined that her path would take her from wartime Poland to faraway Canada.