Gr 4-6-Landau tells the stories of eight survivors (and of a rabbi committed to keeping the memories of Holocaust victims alive). She quotes extensively from their own accounts of Kristallnacht, the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion against the Nazi army, the Nazi medical mutilations of Jews, and the Allied liberation of the death camps. She also movingly relates the experiences of a rabbi participant in the March of the Living program, which brings Jewish high school students from all over the world together in order to walk the routes from Auschwitz to the Birkenau gas chambers. The easy-to-read, very revealing, and unsparingly honest text is accompanied by black-and-white maps and some remarkable photos depicting the horrors of the Nazi genocide. The memories represented in this small book clearly "speak the truth."-Jack Forman, Mesa College Library, San Diego
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From Booklist
Gr. 6-9. Part of the In Their Own Voices series, this is a good introduction for readers who know little of Holocaust history. The immediate personal accounts are arranged more or less chronologically, and Landau weaves in background, explanation, and connections, including black-and-white photographs, individual and historical. In the first account, a woman remembers the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and the horror of Kristallnacht. There are concentration camp descriptions of the selections, the brutality, the liberation. In a final stark chapter, Landau shows and tells a personal story of the silence of survivors and their families long after the war. She discovered, just a year ago, what her Russian Jewish father had never been able to talk about--that his family had been killed in the Holocaust--and she realizes that somehow she has always known. Use this to talk to students about what it was like when racism was the law and some people were considered less than human. Hazel Rochman
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