Pines and Plains Libraries

"Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history." "Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, Diane Ackerman re-creates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "Guests" - Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled...

In a Polish ghetto, Max Rosen and his sister, Zena, struggle to live after their father is taken away by Nazis. With barely enough food to survive, the siblings make a daring escape from Nazi soldiers into the nearby forest. Max and Zena are brought to a safe camp by Jewish resistance fighters. But soon, bombs are falling all around them. Can Max and Zena survive the fallout of the Nazi invasion?

Blends the personal testimony of Holocaust survivor, Jack Mandelbaum, with the history of his time, documented by photos from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"September 1, 1939. Sixty-year-old Janusz Korczak and the students and teachers at his Dom Sierot Jewish orphanage are outside enjoying a beautiful day in Warsaw. Hours later, their lives are altered forever when the Nazis invade. Suddenly treated as an outcast in his own city, Janusz--a respected leader known for his heroism and teaching--is determined to do whatever it takes to protect the children from the horrors to come. When over four hundred...

"Adam, a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Will he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. One of the people he interviews is his flatmate Sala, who is stoic, determined, and funny-and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement,...

Zookeepers Antonina and Jan Zabinski risk their lives to save hundreds of people and animals during the German invasion of Warsaw in World War II.

"Wilhelm Brasse: "I looked death in the eyes. I did it fifty thousand times..." When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, photographer Wilhelm Brasse was sent to Auschwitz. His inability to condone the Third Reich and swear allegiance to Hitler landed him at one of the deadliest concentration camps of WWII. There, he was forced to record the camp's atrocities. From 1940-1945, Brasse took more than 50,000 photos of the nightmare that surrounded him. Brasse's...

In September 1939, as German forces ravage Poland, Captain Alexander de Milja, a Polish intelligence officer with the resistance underground, risks his life in the treacherous world of global espionage to help his country.

Sixteen-year-old Catholic Stefania Podgórska has worked in the Diamant family's grocery store for four years, even falling in love with one of their sons, Izio; but when the Nazis came to Przemyśl, Poland, the Jewish Diamants are forced into the ghetto (and worse) but Izio's brother Max manages to escape, and Stefania embarks on a dangerous course--protecting thirteen Jews in her attic, caring for her younger sister, Helena, and keeping everything...