Schindler's List

Schindler’s List

Thomas Keneally

Hodder & Stoughton; Australia,c1982

ISBN: 0340278382

Schindler’s List  is based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer,Oskar Schindler.

Confronted with the horror of the extermination camps,he gambles his life and his fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Schindler triumphs as being one man who was able to make  a difference to mankind and, because of him, many Jews survived one of the darkest and most horrific chapters in human history.

Schindler’s List is a “ Documentary Novel “, based on the recollections of the Schindlerjuden
( Schindler's Jews), Schindler himself, and other witnesses, and is told in a series of snapshot stories."The book recounts the lives of the flamboyant profiteer and womanizer Schindler,his long suffering wife Emilie, the brutal SS Commandant Amon Goeth, Schindler’s factory manager Itzhak Stern, and several other Jews who witnessed the horrors and inhumanities at Auschwitz. The main protagonist is Oskar Schindler himself. He comes to Krakow, Poland, seeking his fortune and ends up outwitting the SS to protect his Jewish employees. The book explores the complex nature of virtue, the importance of individual human life, the role of witnesses to the Holocaust, and the attention to rules and details that sustained the Nazi system of terror.

Historical Fiction

           

           

          

The lost wife

The Lost Wife

Alyson Richman

Berkley Trade; 2011

ISBN: 978-0425244135

The Lost  Wife is a spellbinding love story and an accurate account of Prague before and during the Second World War.

Growing up in Prague in the 1930’s, Lenka has a happy childhood, but everything changes with the coming of war. With the imminent arrival of the Nazis, the future for Lenka’s Jewish family seems bleak and uncertain.

Just days before the Germans invade Prague, Lenka and Josef, her first love, decide to get married. Josef and his family plan to flee to America with Lenka, but when Lenka discovers that her family cannot get the necessary papers to escape from Prague, she decides to stay behind with them. So begins a journey that will keep Josef and Lenka separated from each other for decades.

When Josef is 85 years old, he and Lenka are reunited, giving them one more chance.

From the glamorous life in Prague before the Occupation to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and the absolute strength of memory.

Clara's war

Clara’s War: One girl’s story of survival.

Clara Kramer

Ecco; 2010

ISBN: 978-0061728617

Clara’s War is the story of Clara Kramer, a Polish Jewish girl, who, along with seventeen other people, hide from the Nazis in an underground bunker during the Second World War.

When the Germans invade her small town, her family is taken in by the Becks, an ethnically German family from the same town.

Mr. Beck is an alcoholic, a womanizer and a vocal anti-semitebut, on hearing that Jewish families were being taken into the woods and shot, Beck gave shelter to the Kramers as well as two other Jewish families.

Eighteen people lived in the bunker and fifteen year old Clara kept a diary of her unpredictable life during those twenty terrifying months.

Clara survived her horrific ordeal and her diary is now part of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

Clara’s  War is both a tense thriller and a heartbreaking drama of human kindness, and shows just how strong the will to survive can be.

Memoir/Historical Fiction

The seamstress

The Seamstress

Sara Tuvel Bernstein

Berkley Trade; 1999

ISBN: 978-04251667307

The Seamstress is a memoir of the Holocaust. It is the story of SaraTuvel Bernstein, a Romanian who grows up to be a feisty fighter against anti-semitism .After receiving a scholarship to a school in Bucharest, Sara’s dream of gaining knowledge comes to an abrupt end when she throws an inkwell in the face of one of her professors after he makes a vicious anti- Jewish remark. She is expelled from the school and begins work as a seamstress.

After a series of incidents ranging from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ends up in Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp. Nineteen out of every twenty women sent there, died.

Amazingly, she survived to tell her story with passion,power,style, and a forgiving heart. A very moving Holocaust memoir.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

Picador,Australia; Knopf,USA,2006.

ISBN: 978-0-375-84220-7

This is the story of a nine-year-old German girl, Liesel Meminger . It is 1939 in Nazi Germany and Liesel,along with her younger brother,Werner,are sent to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. While on the way to their new home Liesel’s brother dies. After the funeral, she finds a book, “The Gravedigger’s Handbook”, in the snow near her brother’s grave. This is the start of a love affair with books. She is taught, by Hans, how to read and begins stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, and anywhere books are to be found. Hans Hubermann, Liesel’s foster father, works as a painter, and he and Liesel share a very close bond. Rosa Hubermann is Liesel’s foul-mouthed foster mother, and even though she rules the household with an iron fist and often swears at Liesel, she cares for her very much. Both Hans and Rosa are killed in the Himmel Street bombing.

 

Rudy Steiner is Liesel’s neighbour and love interest, and Max Vandenburg is a Jewish fist-fighter who the Hubermanns stow away in their home.

The narrator of the book is Death, who is sympathetic to mankind and hates the despair and destruction brought upon humans by War.

The Book Thief is a powerful and haunting novel. It gives great insight into Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It is superbly written and author Markus Zusak has given us, without doubt, one of the most enduring stories of our time. The Book Thief is suitable for Young Adult and Adult readers.

Historical Fiction