As
I am preparing for book talks next week to the 8th grade regular LA
classes as part of their Diary of Anne Frank unit, I have realized
how many excellent Holocaust books we have in our collection. Among
the non-fiction books, I think my favorite is Barbara Rogasky's Smoke
and Ashes; The Story of the Holocaust which is an overview beginning
with the origins of Jewish persecution in the early years of
Christianity and ending with the Nuremburg trials and justice.
In
the fiction section the choice is more difficult. I really like Susan
Campbell Bartoletti's The Boy Who Dared and Paul Dowswell's The
Auslander. These books are about German boys who saw what was
happening and worked to try and stop it. Michael Morpurgo's The
Mozart Question and Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic give us
stories about what it was like inside the concentration camps. Lois
Lowry's Number the Stars tells how sympathetic families tried to
protect Jews. Jerry Spinelli's Milkweed shows what life was like
inside the Warsaw Ghetto. And finally, Joan M. Wolf's Someone Named
Eva and Donna Jo Napoli's Stones in Water show how poorly people of
Germany's allies and conquered countries were treated. The students
next week will have many fine books to choose for their project.
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