concentration camp inmates

"Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940 . . . Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp--Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible--but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself . . ."--Dust jacket.

Examines life in a Nazi concentration camp, focusing on deportation and arrivals, housing, food, and other living conditions, forced labor and other inmate and other inmate exploitation and other topics.

When Helene Hannemann awoke one May morning in 1943, she prepared for a normal day of taking the children to school and getting herself to work while her husband stayed home and tended to their youngest child. However, the relative peace of her quiet life was destroyed when Nazi soldiers order her family to be taken to a concentration camp because her husband was Romani. Though she was German and not order to go with them, she insisted and remained with them during their time at Auschwitz until their death in the gas chamber in 1944. Includes a chronology, a glossary, and text-related discussion questions.

Leon Leyson describes growing up in Poland, being forced from home to ghetto to concentration camps by the Nazis, and being saved by Oskar Schindler.

"Fourteen-year-old Lettie and her family are Afrikaners, Dutch settlers in turn-of-the-century southern Africa. When the British Empire wages a brief but brutal two-year war against them, Afrikaner forces will lose thirty-five hundred soldiers, but the toll on Dutch women and children will be eight times greater. Now a footnote, this period in history bears one particularly abhorrent distinction: the use of concentration camps three decades before Hitler. More than twenty-six thousand Dutch women and children will have died of disease and starvation in British concentration camps by the war's end. Taken from their farm and forced into one such camp, Lettie and her family fight to survive in the face of unimaginable conditions. Brave, defiant Lettie longs to be a writer. Enriched by fond memories of stargazing with her grandfather before the war and emboldened by her mother's strength in the face of so much hardship, Lettie is a courageous heroine who refuses to be bowed by adversity"--.

In 1945 Moritz Nachstern sat down in his Oslo apartment to tell the story of how he survived the Holocaust. Seven hundred and seventy-one Jews from Norway were taken during the German occupation of 1940-45. He was one of only thirty-four who came back. He nearly died in Auschwitz before he was selected for the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the isolated Block 19. The SS watched the occupants of Block 19 carefully for it was these men who produced perfect counterfeit British and American money for the Nazis.

"1944. Physics professor Alfred Mendl is separated from his family and sent to the men's camp, where all of his belongings are tossed on a roaring fire. His books, his papers, his life's work. The Nazis have no idea what they have just destroyed. And without that physical record, Alfred is one of only two people in the world with his particular knowledge. Knowledge that could start a war, or end it. Nathan Blum works behind a desk at an intelligence office in Washington, DC, but he longs to contribute to the war effort in a more meaningful way, and he has a particular skill set the U.S. suddenly needs. Nathan is fluent in German and Polish, he is Semitic looking, and he proved his scrappiness at a young age when he escaped from the Polish ghetto. Now, the government wants him to take on the most dangerous assignment of his life: Nathan must sneak into Auschwitz, on a mission to find and escape with one man. This historical thriller from New York Times bestseller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, unputdownable series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely compelling"--.

"This absorbing and captivating nonfiction account (with never-before-published photographs) offers readers an in-depth anthropological and historical look into the lives of those who suffered and survived Breendonk concentration camp during the Holocaust of World War II"--.

"Amid the brutality of Auschwitz during the Holocaust, a forbidden gift helps two teenage girls find hope, friendship, and the will to live in this novel in verse that's based on a true story."--Publisher.