Be A Mensch: Holocaust Memoirs
Alexander B. White, M.D.

Summary: Holocaust memoirs of a survivor saved by Schindler. Dr. White was 14 when the German invaded Poland and began their reign of terror. His father's last words as they were taking him to the gas chambers were to be a Mensch, which is Yiddish for "a special, ideal human being: a person endowed with the finest attributes by Our Creator, including charity, kindness, tolerance, honesty and love of mankind." This is his memoir of trying to do that. He immigrated to Chicago after the War ended and became a successful doctor and medical school professor.

Death & Diamonds
Laura Soldinger Yotter and Valerie Lee

Summary: "Death & Diamonds" is the inspiring true story of Samuel Soldinger, who survived seven Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, worked for Oskar Schindler, and was finally liberated from Mauthausen Death Camp in World War II. Samuel eventually made his way to America and landed a position with diamond magnate Harry Winston, teaching Native Americans in Arizona the art of diamond cutting.

Much of this book is told in Samuel's own words, as he was compelled to share his story with the hope that the horrors of the Holocaust never happen again. Powerful and poignant, ultimately Samuel’s story is one of perseverance, courage and dignity. The years of unthinkable brutality did not break the spirit of this sweet, strong and gentle giant, who flourished beyond those harrowing days to brighter new ones. This book is also dedicated to the more than 6 million Jews and others who endured or perished from the atrocities of the Holocaust. This is to honor them, and spread love, kindness, healing, hope and peace for generations to come. May we never forget.

Survival
Magda Herzberger

Summary: The Autobiography of a Young Woman Who Survived the Horrors of the Nazi Death Camps. Survival is an autobiography in which the author relates her experiences and her struggle to survive during her captivity as a young, 18-year-old girl in the three German concentration camps: Auschwitz, Bremen, and Bergen Belsen.

A Boy’s Story A Man’s Memory: Surviving the Holocaust 1933 – 1945
Oskar Knoblauch

Summary: Oskar Knoblauch (born 1925 in Leipzig Germany), reflects on his childhood and youth while growing up in his native Germany. Thrust into the dark years of Nazi Germany's hatred and brutality of Jews, Oskar writes of his family's struggle to survive the holocaust of World War II (1933-1945).

Living A Life That Matters: from Nazi Nightmare to American Dream
Ben Lesser

Summary: Living A Life That Matters is one of the motivational and inspirational books written by Holocaust survivors. In this engaging, inspiring, and educational Holocaust survivor memoir, Ben Lesser invites you to revisit a time in history when the world went mad. Learn how this ordinary, young Jewish teenager from Krakow, Poland, survived through extraordinary times living in ghettos, enduring four concentrations camps – including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau – two death marches, and two death trains. After liberation from Dachau, the Holocaust survivor slowly healed, eventually recovering physically from his near-death experience. At age 18 – penniless, uneducated, and unable to speak English – he made his way to the USA and succeeded in living the American Dream.

We survived… at last I speak
Leon Malmed

Summary: The true story of two small children,

Rachel and Leon, whose fate was sealed by destiny and the folly of men. For Rachel and Leon were Jewish, at a time when being Jewish was synonymous with oppression, deportation and death. In the turmoil of the war and occupation, both children were fortunate to cross paths with two people who saved their lives. Their courage led them to be recognized as Righteous among the Nations. Henri and Suzanne Ribouleau offered to take Rachel and Leon when their parents were arrested by the French police working for the Nazis on Sunday July 19, 1942 at 5AM.

Surviving the Holocaust in Siberia: The Diary
Pearl Minz

Summary: Few know about those who survived in Siberia.  Surviving the Holocaust in Siberia: The Diary of Pearl Minz is a translation of a diary, originally written in Polish, that was kept by Pearl Minz, a middle-aged mother of seven, who escaped with some of her family from Nazi occupied Poland to Soviet occupied Poland only to be transported by the Soviets to far away Siberia.  She wrote her diary in secret on scraps of paper and newspapers.  It details their hardships – including the months it took to get to Siberia and the subhuman living conditions they found there – as well as their hopes to return to their hometown of Krosno, Poland.  The ending is particularly powerful as Pearl, who thought the family she had left behind was still alive, there having been little communication during the war between the countries, learns of the magnitude of the Holocaust and her family that has perished.   

Surviving the Holocaust in Siberia: The Diary of Pearl Minz was translated by Alexander Bialywlos White, M.D., a neighbor of the Minz family in Krosno, and a friend of Pearl’s son Baruck who emigrated to Israel after the war and who donated his mother’s original diary to Yad Vashem. Dr. White’s memoirs, Be A Mensch: A Father’s Legacy, details his own story surviving the Holocaust.  The title stems from the last words his father said to him before being transported to Auschwitz and gassed: “Be a mensch” – “a good human being.”  In addition to describing his experiences with Germans, Poles and other nationalities in various labor and concentration camps, Be A Mensch also describes what Krosno was like before World War II, an era also comparable to Fiddler on the Roof.  When speaking about his experiences – to teach the need for tolerance and inclusion – Dr. White uses not only examples from his own life but also from the Minz family.   

Outcry: Holocaust Memoirs of Manny Steinberg
Manny Steinberg

Summary: Manny Steinberg (1925-2015) spent his teens in Nazi camps in Germany and Poland, miraculously surviving while millions perished. This is his story. Born in 1925 in the Jewish ghetto in Radom (Poland), Manny Steinberg soon realized that people of Jewish faith were increasingly being regarded as outsiders. When the Nazis invaded in September 1939 the nightmare started. The city's Jewish population had no chance of escaping and was faced with starvation, torture, sexual abuse and ultimately deportation. Outcry is the candid account of a teenager who survived four Nazi camps: Dachau, Auschwitz, Vaihingen and Neckagerach. While being subjected to torture and degradation, he agonized over two haunting questions: "Why the Jews?" and "How can the world let this happen?" These questions remain hard to answer.

Lonely Chameleon
Marion Weinzweig

Summary: Lonely Chameleon is a story of survival.

It is a story of genocide, tragedy, ruthless separations, unimaginable heartache, and, eventually, of triumph. It is the personal story of Marion Weinzweig, a young Jewish child caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust in 1940s Poland. Marion’s family life in her hometown of Apt was idyllic until the occupying Germans set into motion their relentless purge of Jews. We see through Marion's eyes, and the accounts of her few surviving relatives, the terror of families ripped apart as they were rounded up like cattle and transported to their deaths in concentration camps.

Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die
Sidney Finkel

Summary: Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die is a unique and powerful memoir about a young boy's journey during the Holocaust and his effort later to make peace with the past.

Breaking The Silence: Reminiscences of a Hidden Child
Paul A. Schwarzbart

Summary: Can one predict what a child will remember?Paul Schwarzbart vividly recalls looking out his window daily at the Austrian flag atop a school nearby; one day, without warning, the Nazi flag replaced it. "From that moment on," he remembers, "everything deteriorated rapidly."During World War II, Paul Schwarzbart lived a life of secrecy.In the spring of 1943, young Schwarzbart was hidden in the Ardennes by the Jewish underground at the Home Reine Elizabeth, a Catholic boys' school near Luxembourg. There, for two years he assumed the role of a Belgian Catholic under the name of Paul Exsteen. The model student soon became an altar boy and Cub Scout leader and was eventually baptized in secret. Unable to divulge his real identity, he felt a painful loneliness gnawing at his heart. And all the while, he suffered from the agony and uncertainty of not knowing his parents' whereabouts.This book is his story. It is a story of love and hope, as well as man's terrible inhumanity to man.

The Miami Showband Massacre: A Survivor’s search for the truth
Stephen Travers and Neil Fetherstonhaugh

Summary: Before this revised 2017 edition, the first edition of The Miami Showband Massacre, published in 2007 was the long awaited inside story of the band, the massacre and its controversial aftermath. The atrocity was headlined all over Ireland and beyond as The Day the Music Died as The Miami Showband was the most popular band in Ireland at the time. On July 31st 1975 their mini bus was stopped by what looked like a British Army patrol but was in fact the Loyalist terrorist group's UVF's notorious Glenanne Gang, some of whom were in the British Army's locally recruited UDR regiment. The terrorists planted a bomb in the mini bush which exploded prematurely killing two of the bombers immediately. Their comrades then machine gunned the band, killing three and leaving the author, seriously injured Stephen Travers, to play dead in order to survive. Since publication much more of the Collusion between the UVF gang responsible and the British Military Intelligence has come to light and this 2017 edition includes pertinent revelations regarding Collusion, elements of which are now being exposed.

Hidden Pearl - A Story About Courage, Hope and Resilience
J.E. Laufer

AWARD WINING
Inscribed by the Author

It was 1939 and Hitler's troops were advancing into Poland. At 10 years old, Pearl's world and her family's lives were turned upside down.

Hidden Pearl is an unforgettable story, vividly capturing young Pearl's ordeal during the Holocaust.
This is a story about courage, hope and the resilience of a young girl and her family during a devastating time in our history.

Choices
J.E. Laufer

AWARD WINING
Inscribed by the Author

Only a decade has passed since their ordeal in the Holocaust. They came home, to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, only to find themselves again placed in harm's way.

What if the CHOICES were to live in a country that offered your family a future without freedom or risk everything and everyone in search of a better life?

Which would you choose? Read this uplifting, unforgettable story of courage, bravery and the power of human kindness that fills the pages of this epic novel.

The Birds Sang Eulogies: A Memoir
Mirla Geclewicz Raz

Summary: In this poignant memoir, The Birds Sang Eulogies, Anna and Danny Geslewitz's incredible stories of survival are told by them, their daughter and their granddaughter, three generations affected by the Holocaust. Danny's harrowing story began the moment the Germans invaded Lodz, Poland in 1939. His harrowing story of survival begins in the ghetto where starvation and death were rampant. When the Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1944, Danny and his remaining family members were sent to Auschwitz. Danny's account of hell on earth leaves the reader horrified. After enduring Auschwitz for three weeks, Danny and his brothers began nightmarish journeys to seven forced labor camps were they endured inconceivable deprivations. After witnessing two brothers perish, Danny is near death when suddenly the Germans disappear.

Living in the eastern Polish city of Lvov, Anna vividly describes life and death in the Lvov Ghetto. When it becomes clear that the Germans will kill every remaining Jew in the ghetto, she and her sister flee into Germany. There, Anna works as a maid in German household. She lives a life of constant terror fearing that her Jewish identity will be discovered.

The mayhem of liberation brings its own challenges to Anna and Danny. Barely alive, Danny struggled to regain his health. Anna scrambled to find a way to survive in the chaos and find her sister from whom she had been separated. As Danny and Anna worked to find their place in life, they meet in Germany. Together, they begin a memorable new chapter. Years later, their daughter and granddaughter travel to Poland. Their personal accounts of their trips are riveting.

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Resistance on a Bicycle
Dirk Van Leenen

Summary: Experience World War II tension in the life of a four-year-old boy who plays a part in hiding Jews. He feels the concern about the shortage of food and learns to grow vegetables for his family. See a father who must play several roles during the war, on one side having to work for the Nazis, in his spare time hide and transfer Jews to farms and providing them with counterfeit documents and distribution stamps. He must face roadblocks and cheat the soldiers, meanwhile worrying how to provide food and shelter to his family and hundreds of Jewish fugitives.

The Americans are Coming!!!

Summary: In the City of The Hague, the war was very intense. Kees van Rijn, who was in charge of hiding the Jews and getting them safely to farm-hiding-places, was on his bicycle every day. He took his young son with him on the back of the bicycle. Cornelius was his perfect decoy in the operation. The boy was packed with counterfeit distribution stamps and fake ID’s for the Jews in hiding. To Cornelius each day was an adventure and he played his role without feeling the enormous threat of the war.

The Last Train to the Concentration Camp

Summary: After almost five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, Kees and Johanna were still active in hiding Jews and providing them with some of their needs. Even though Johanna was Jewish, she had never been faced with an arrest for deportation to a Concentration Camp. Her Jewish last name “Schmall” had been changed to Smal by a simple, rural civil servant when they married. The clerical error had saved her life.

Where Did Papa Go?
by Judy Egett Laufer (Author)
Jr. Wingfield, Ken S. (Illustrator)

Inscribed by the Author

Summary: A little girl recalls the good times she had with her grandfather, and describes how she misses him