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The great escape: the untold story
By Ted Barris. 2014
On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty airmen crawled through a 400-foot-long tunnel, code-named "Harry," and dashed from Stalag…
Luft III, the infamous WWII German POW camp. It became known as The Great Escape. The breakout had taken a year to plan, involved 2,000 POWs, and prompted a massive manhunt across occupied Europe. All but three escapees were recaptured, and on Hitler’s orders, fifty were murdered. The author recounts this battle of wits and determination through the voices of those involved, assembles original interviews, memoirs, letters and diaries to reconstruct the Great Escape’s untold story. Bestseller. 2014.The girl in the green sweater: a life in Holocaust's shadow
By Daniel Paisner, Krystyna Chiger. 2008
In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of…
Polish Jews sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, provides a first-person account of those fourteen months with her family. Also describes Leopold Socha, a Polish Catholic and former thief, who risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food and supplies. 2009, c2008.The fog of war: censorship of Canada's media in World War Two
By Mark Bourrie. 2011
The Canadian government censored the news during World War II for two main reasons: to keep military and economic secrets…
out of enemy hands and to prevent civilian morale from breaking down. But in those tumultuous times - with Nazi spies landing on our shores by raft, U-boat attacks in the St. Lawrence, army mutinies in British Columbia and Ontario, and pro-Hitler propaganda in the mainstream Quebec press - censors had a hard time keeping news events contained. Now, with freshly unsealed World War II press-censor files, many of the undocumented events that occurred in wartime Canada are finally revealed. c2011.The damned: the Canadians at the battle of Hong Kong and the POW experience, 1941-45
By Nathan M Greenfield. 2010
Fall, 1941. Almost 2,000 members of the Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenadiers were sent to bolster the British garrison at…
Hong Kong, but in the seventeen day battle for the colony following the attack on December 8, the Canadians suffered grievous losses. The second part of their story describes how the Canadians survived the horrendous conditions of Japanese POW camps. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and strong language. 2010.Sun in winter: a Toronto wartime journal, 1942 to 1945
By Gunda Lambton. 2003
In 1942 Gunda Lambton was a "war guest," a single mother sent from England to Toronto to avoid the war.…
While insanity raged throughout Europe she struggled to keep herself and her two small children going in a strange new home. While many people then were engaged in dramatic, heroic war work, her diary is a tribute to the quiet areas of endurance and pleasures of discovery that also distinguished those years. 2003.Portrait du Gulf Stream: éloge des courants : promenade
By Erik Orsenna. 2005
The Liberation Campaign for Holland, a series of fierce battles during the last three months of the war, was bittersweet…
- a nation's freedom was won and the war concluded, but the fighting cost Canada over 6,000 casualties. Drawing upon official records and veteran memories, Zuehlke brings to life this concluding chapter in the story of Canada in World War II. Explicit descriptions of violence and strong language. Bestseller. 2010. (Canadian Battle Series)Les disparus
By Daniel Mendelsohn, Pierre Guglielmina. 2007
Ce livre est le récit d'une enquête personnelle sur le drame familial inséparable de la plus grande tragédie du XXe…
siècle : l'extermination des juifs par les nazis. L'auteur raconte comment une partie de sa famille a disparu dans l'est de la Pologne au début des années 1940, sans laisser d'autres traces que quelques lettres, des photos et surtout un souvenir vivace chez les membres survivants. Il décrit aussi comment il s'est emparé des rares indices à sa disposition pour tenter de découvrir ce qu'ils étaient exactement devenus et les conclusions auxquelles il est finalement parvenu après avoir compulsé quantité d'ouvrages, traversé quatre continents, rencontré de multiples témoins et soulevé de réels tabous, y compris au sein de sa propre famille. 2007. Titre uniforme: Lost.Le retour du hooligan: une vie (Fiction & Cie)
By Norman Manea, Nicolas Véron. 2006
Né en Bucovine en 1936, Norman Manea a été déporté dans un camp de concentration en Transnistrie, en 1941, comme…
l'ensemble de la population juive de cette région. Ses grands-parents y périront. À son retour, en 1945, il est fasciné par l'utopie communiste, mais s'aperçoit très vite de la réalité cruelle, perverse et tragi-comique de ce régime totalitaire. Dès lors, la littérature se présente à lui comme un véritable refuge. Poussé à l'exil en 1986, d'abord à Berlin-Ouest, puis à New York, il se voit privé de son dernier asile et seul ancrage, sa langue. Ce somptueux roman évoque soixante ans de ténèbres, ce qui n'empêche pas un humour parfois burlesque. L'auteur explore un "je" aux multiples facettes pour faire revivre un destin individuel débarrassé des clichés de victimisation de la mémoire collective ; il offre un fulgurant autoportrait entre terreur et beauté, qui dévoile une époque chaotique et sanglante. 2006.American vertigo
By Bernard Henri Lévy. 2006
Où va l'amérique ? Devant ce pays colossal et blessé, contradictoire et protéiforme, devant ce pays-concept dont les emblèmes, nobles…
ou infamants, tournent à n'en pas finir sur le manège médiatique mondial, chacun est pris de vertige. American Vertigo ? Un livre-enquête mobile et chaleureux. Un reportage conceptuel et un " road book " sensuel, cérébral, drôle, véridique. La perspicacité du philosophe. L'oeil et le style du romancier. 2006.Branded by the pink triangle
By Carolyn Jackson, Ken Setterington, Malcolm Lester, Jonathan Schmidt. 2013
A history of the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazi regime during the years of the Holocaust. When the Nazis…
came to power in Europe, the lives of homosexuals came to be ruled by fear as raids, arrests, prison sentences and expulsions became the daily reality. When the concentration camps were built, homosexuals were imprisoned along with Jews. The pink triangle, sewn onto prison uniforms, became the symbol of their persecution. For junior and senior high readers. 2013.Dieppe: Canada's darkest day of World War II
By Hugh Brewster. 2009
On the night of August 19, 1942, a force of five thousand Canadians launched an attack on the Nazi-held French…
port of Dieppe. When it was over, the Allies were forced to retreat, nearly a thousand Canadian troops lay dead, and almost two thousand were taken prisoner. For years, defenders of the raid claimed that the Allies learned valuable lessons from Dieppe that were put to use later in the war, but others believed that the Canadian soldiers had been used as cannon fodder. Includes sections about the evacuation and the POW experiences. Explicit descriptions of violence. Grades 3-6. 2009.Berlin at war: Life And Death In Hitler's Capital, 1939-45
By Roger Moorhouse. 2010
Berlin was the city at the very centre of World War Two - it was the launching pad for Hitler's…
empire, the embodiment of his vision of a "world metropolis", and it also suffered more air raids than any other German city and endured the full force of a Soviet siege. Moorhouse uses diaries, memoirs, and interviews to provide a first-hand account of life and death in the Nazi capital. Explicit descriptions of violence and some strong language. c2010.Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
By Timothy Snyder. 2010
Even before the Second World War began, Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens - and kept killing…
them during and after the war - and before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving their history in darkness. Snyder presents these mass murders as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Descriptions of violence. 2010.The last train: a Holocaust story
By Rona Arato. 2013
The harrowing true story about young brothers Paul and Oscar Arato and their mother, Lenke, surviving the Nazi occupation of…
Hungary during the final years of World War II. Grades 4-7. Winner of the 2015 Red Maple Non-Fiction Award. 2013.In the upper reaches of the Loire lies an isolated plateau and the secluded village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Their whole…
village was honoured not just by the French state, but with the extremely rare distinction of Righteous Among Nations by the people of Israel. How they earned this is one of the great modern stories of heroism and courage. Right through the War the community pulled off the astonishing feat of saving the lives of 5000 men, women and children whose very existence was deemed to be unpalatable to the Nazi occupiers and their Vichy stooges. Of those saved approximately 3500 were of Jewish descent. This title tells the story of how one French community saved these lives. 2014.Wild: a journey from lost to found
By Cheryl Strayed. 2015
At 26, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family disbanded and…
her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk 1,100 miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington State - and to do it alone. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the journey was nothing more than a line on a map. But it held a promise - a promise of piecing together a life that lay in ruins at her feet. 2015.Aimé Tschiffely had an unlikely dream: to ride 10,000 miles from Buenos Aires to New York City. On 23 April…
1925 this quiet, unassuming schoolteacher, with little equestrian experience, set out on his epic journey. His only companions were two native Argentine horses called Mancha and Gato. Together the trio traversed the Pampas, scaled the Andes and swam across the crocodile-infested rivers of Colombia. Along the way they were assailed by vampire bats, mistaken for gods and stalked by hostile revolutionaries. After two harrowing years, the man who had originally been labelled 'a lunatic' by the press was accorded a ticker-tape parade when he rode triumphantly through the streets of New York. 2014.Option B: facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy
By Sheryl Sandberg, Adam M Grant. 2017
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure…
joy again. Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Combines Sheryl's personal insights with Adam's research on finding strength in the face of adversity. "Option B" goes beyond Sheryl's loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere. and to rediscover joy. Bestseller. 2017.In the slender margin: the intimate strangeness of death and dying
By Eve Joseph. 2014
Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, this book is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view.…
Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, the author utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable mystery that awaits us all. 2014.