When Germany invaded Poland, bombers devastated Warsaw--and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into the empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed...

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another...

"1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, Poland, during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her mother are forced to seek refuge in the sewers beneath the city. Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she catches...

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation,...

On the last night of Hanukkah, Lady Sadie summons her children, the Eight Knights of Hanukkah, to stop the dastardly dragon that is interrupting party preparations, using kindness and bravery. Includes notes on the traditions of Hanukkah and directions for playing the dreidel game.

An aspiring writer, an athlete from a professional cyclist family and a mathematics prodigy find their bond tested by a love triangle and the spread of anti-Semitism and fascism in 1937 Italy.

"Irena Sendler was one of the most remarkable--and most unlikely--heroes of World War II, saving 2500 Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland. As a social worker, Irena had access to the Warsaw Ghetto, making it possible for her to rescue the daughter of a Jewish friend and safely hide the young girl with a Catholic family. Realizing that thousands of children were still in danger, Irena recruited sympathetic friends and co-workers...

Details the efforts of people who risked their own lives to save thousands of Jews and others from Nazi persecution.

"It's the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau realizes her only means of escape is to advertise her services as a domestic servant in England. Fate brings her ad to the attention of Christopher Rivers, handsome scion of the aristocratic Rivers family and master of Tyneford. An anxious Elise arrives at Tyneford and immediately falls under its spell. When Christopher's young son, Kit, returns home,...