"In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. She has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain her Jewish neighbors. She knows all too well about German brutality--and that it's the reason she must conceal her true identity. But in befriending...

"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,...

As bombs rain down on Warsaw and Hitler's forces surround the city, childhood friends Marta and Janina join the war effort using one of the only weapons that still feel safe to them: literature, fighting to preserve their culture and community and finding hope in each other in order to survive.

NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANT

An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel...

When the rabbi tells Mendel to get a table for the Chanukah menorah, Mendel makes the task more difficult than it should be.

A Polish Jew on the eve of World War II, Janusz Korczak turned down opportunities for escape in order to stand by the children in his orphanage as they became confined to the Warsaw Ghetto. Dressing them in their Sabbath finest, he led their march to the trains and ultimately perished with his children in Treblinka. Marrin examines not just Korczak's life but his ideology of children: that children are valuable in and of themselves, as individuals....

"The astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg--a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat--drawing on Mehlberg's own unpublished memoir. World War II and the Holocaust have given rise to many stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the remarkable, unknown story of "Countess Janina Suchodolska," a Jewish woman who rescued more...

In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Pazinski, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors. When his grandmother was alive, he had spent a great deal of time at this boarding house, and now he returns, as if to get one last glimpse of the past--to look at old faces and think old thoughts. Pazinski's narrative is at once dreamlike and...

Warsaw, December 1945: the Second World War is finally over and Mathilde is treating the last of the French survivors of the German camps. When a panicked Benedictine nun appears at the clinic one night begging Mathilde to follow her back to the convent, what she finds there is shocking: a holy sister about to give birth and several more in advanced stages of pregnancy.