9 Lang-Lit: WW II Books

A blind French girl and a German boy cross paths in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks.

A heart-pounding, inventive, and powerful new novel about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941. Best friends Frank and Stanley have it good. With their dads stationed at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, the boys get to soak up the sunshine while writing and drawing their own comic books. World War II might be raging overseas, but so far America has stayed out of the fight. There's nothing to fear, right?

Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, journalist Antonio Iturbe tells the incredible story of a girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust. Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.

Follows a boy who joins the underground Ukrainian resistance in the fight against Hitler. The Nazis took Luka from his home in Ukraine and forced him into a labor camp. Now, Luka has smuggled himself out - even though he left behind his dearest friend, Lida. Someday, he vows, he'll find her again. But first, he must survive.

A thrilling spy mission, a moving Holocaust story, and a first-class work of narrative nonfiction. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Adolf Eichmann, the head of operations for the Nazis' Final Solution, walked into the mountains of Germany and vanished from view. Sixteen years later, an elite team of spies captured him at a bus stop in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel, resulting in one of the century's most important trials -- one that cemented the Holocaust in the public imagination.

The moving true story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias "Anna") and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaust.

True stories of Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany, risking everything to escape to safety on the Kindertransport. Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish families like Ruth's experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks.

A true story of two Jewish teenagers racing against time during the Holocaust--one in hiding in Hungary, and the other in Auschwitz, plotting escape. It is 1944. A teenager named Rudolf (Rudi) Vrba has made up his mind. After barely surviving nearly two years in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, he knows he must escape. Even if death is more likely.