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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.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.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.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.The immortalization commission: science and the strange quest to cheat death
By John Gray. 2011
For most of human history, religion provided a clear explanation of life and death, but in the late 19th and…
early 20th centuries new ideas - from psychiatry to evolution to Communism - seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. Gray investigates the belief that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, and the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals that there was a non-religious form of life after death. c2011.Villa Air-Bel: World War II, escape, and a house in Marseille
By Rosemary Sullivan. 2006
In France of the 1940s, the Nazis were hunting down artists and intellectuals, and many of them, including Max Ernst,…
Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, and Marc Chagall, found temporary shelter in a house in a suburb of Marseille. There, members of the American Emergency Rescue Committee hid them and arranged the visas that would give them safe passage out of Vichy France. Harvard-educated scholar Varian Fry led the effort, eventually saving 2,000 artists and intellectuals. 2006.After life: ways we think about death
By Merrie-Ellen Wilcox. 2019
Moving between science and culture, Wilcox takes a straightforward look at the fascinating, diverse ways in which we understand death,…
both today and throughout our history. Each chapter includes a brief telling of a death legend, myth or history from a dNobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End: A Memoir
By Liz Levine. 2020
A genuinely moving, funny, and inventive account of loss and grief, mental illness and suicide, from film and TV producer…
Liz Levine (Story of a Girl), written in the aftermath of the deaths of her sister and best friend.I feel like I might be a terrible person to be laughing in these moments. But it turns out, I’m not alone. In November of 2016, Liz Levine’s younger sister, Tamara, reached a breaking point after years of living with mental illness. In the dark hours before dawn, she sent a final message to her family then killed herself. In Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End, Liz weaves the story of what happened to Tamara with another significant death—that of Liz’s childhood love, Judson, to cancer. She writes about her relationship with Judson, Tamara’s struggles, the conflicts that arise in a family of challenging personalities, and how death casts a long shadow. This memorable account of life and loss is haunting yet filled with dark humor—Tamara emails her family when Trump is elected to check if she’s imagining things again, Liz discovers a banana has been indicted as a whistleblower in an alleged family conspiracy, and a little niece declares Tamara’s funeral the “most fun ever!” With honesty, Liz exposes the raw truths about grief and mourning that we often shy away from—and almost never share with others. And she reveals how, in the midst of death, life—with all its messy complications—must also be celebrated.How to Die: A Book About Being Alive
By Ray Robertson. 2020
“He who would teach men to die would teach them to live,” writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to…
Die: A Book on Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature’s most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we’ll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.With many jurisdictions considering whether or not to implement new assisted-death legislation, Choosing to Live, Choosing to Die is a…
timely look at the subject for teen readers who may not yet have had much experience with death and dying. Readers are introduced to the topic of assisted dying through the author's own story. The issue continues to be hotly debated in families, communities and countries around the world, and there are no easy answers. Choosing to Live, Choosing to Die looks at the issue from multiple perspectives and encourages readers to listen with an open mind and a kind heart and reach their own conclusions.The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships that Won WWII
By Neville Thompson. 2021
"A welcome new bright spot in the vast literature of World War II." – DAVID SHRIBMAN The relationship between Winston…
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was among the most momentous - and mysterious - in history. The story of how these fiercely independent leaders worked together to defeat Hitler's Germany has been divined mainly from their cautious letters and the comments of staffers. Meanwhile, the detailed record of their fellow head of government, Canadian Prime Minister William L. Mackenzie King, who knew each of them better than they knew each other, has been largely overlooked. A sublime diplomat, King was determined, as leader of the largest British Dominion and America’s closest neighbour, to serve as a lynchpin between the great powers. Churchill and Roosevelt both came to rely upon him as their next most important ally, routinely confiding in him and never suspecting that he was meticulously recording every word, prayer, slight, and tic from their countless interactions in his voluminous unpublished diary. The Third Man offers us a truly unique look at the personalities, the strategies, and the epic relationship that won WWII.The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War
By Lezlie Lowe. 2022
The long-awaited narrative history of the women who volunteered in Nova Scotia during the Second World War by award-winning journalist…
and author of No Place to Go. "I was home cooking carrots because my mother was off winning the war." -- Patricia Timbrell, whose mother, Amy Jones, along with her friend Una Smith, established and ran the Central Magazine Exchange, which distributed four million used magazines and 30,000 packs of cards by June 1942 alone for troop and merchant ships in Halifax Harbour. Halifax women won the Second World War -- but not in the ways you might have been told. We all know the stories of Canadian women during the war who trained as machinists, welders, and streetcar drivers to fill the shoes of men who answered the call. We know how women kept the home fires lit while their husbands, brothers, and fathers fought. This is not that story. The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War is the untold story of Halifax women who geared up in a flash to focus on the comfort, community connections, and mental health of Halifax?s exploding population of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and merchant mariners. They did a job no government could have organized or afforded. They did it without being asked. And they did it with no respite from their daily duties. Thoroughly researched and compellingly told, and with a dozen archival images, The Volunteers examines the untold stories of the hardworking women whose unpaid and unacknowledged labour won the Second World War.