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Showing 1 - 20 of 109 items
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.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.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.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.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)By Trevor Greene, Debbie Greene. 2012
2006. Trevor Greene, a journalist and a reservist in the Canadian Army, was at a meeting with village elders in…
Afghanistan when a teenage boy under the influence of the Taliban swung an axe into his skull. After years of rehabilitation, setbacks and crises, Trevor learned to talk and move again, with the love and support of his fiancée Debbie. Their story is told in two voices: Trevor’s, up until the attack that changed their lives; and Debbie’s, as she works tirelessly to rehabilitate the man she loves. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and explicit strong language. c2012.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.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.By Michel Renouard. 2012
" Derrière le héros mythique, joué par Peter O'Toole dans le célèbre film de David Lean, se cache un personnage…
complexe, non exempt de zones d'ombre. Archéologue et agent de renseignement, homme d'action et auteur des Sept Piliers de la sagesse, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888 - 1935) se disait à moitié poète, se voulait intouchable, et mourut prématurément dans un accident de moto. Ce livre retrace la vie et les aventures de l'insaisissable Lawrence d'Arabie, dont Winston Churchill affirmait qu'il était un des êtres les plus extraordinaires de son temps. " -- 4e de couv.By Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, Winnie Yeung. 2018
Tells the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, a young boy whose family moved from Iraq to Syria just before…
the start of the Syrian civil war. It recounts what it was like living in Syria during this time -- the normal things like video games, sleepovers, and family jarringly juxtaposed with car bombings, massacres, and the constant threat of what could happen next. In 2014 the family finally found safety in immigrating to Edmonton, Canada, and the book also recounts both the gratefulness and the loneliness of the family's immigration experience. 2018.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.By Christie Blatchford. 2007
Blatchford has covered the conflict in Afghanistan as an embedded reporter, and provides observations of military life in the twenty-first…
century. The troops share their accounts of their desire to serve, their willingness to confront fear and danger on the battlefield, their loyalty towards each other and the heartbreak occasioned by the loss of one of their own. Descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and some strong language. Winner of the 2008 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. 2007.By Barth Hoogstraten. 2001
Hoogstraten was a Dutch medical student in 1942 when the Nazis wanted him to sign a loyalty decree to the…
occupying forces. He refused to do so and went into hiding, taking shelter with Ann and Bets Frank, two blind middle-aged music teachers. Some descriptions of sex, descriptions of violence, some strong language. 2001.By Ruth Martin, Bettina Stangneth. 2014
A total re-assessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann that reveals his activities and notoriety amongst a global network of…
National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich, and permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself as an overworked bureaucrat following orders. How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? 2014. Uniform title: Eichmann vor Jerusalem.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.By James Loney. 2011
Iraq, November 2005. James Loney and three other men, all members of Christian Peacemaker Teams, were taken hostage at gunpoint.…
The Swords of Righteousness Brigade released videos of the men, resulting in what is likely the most publicized kidnapping of the Iraq War. One man was murdered, the rest held 118 days before being rescued. 2011.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.By Carol Off. 2017
Tells the gripping story of a family's desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee…
life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate--yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government. Winner of the 2018 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Bestseller. 2017.By Chris Tarrant. 2014
Chris Tarrant and his father Basil were very close - they played sports together, watched sports together, and shared the…
same sense of humour. Chris loved and admired his father but it was only after his death he realised that he hardly knew him at all. Basil Avery Tarrant grew up in 1920s Reading. He worked as an administrator in a local factory and spent his Saturday nights down at the music halls. But what happened to Basil during the war, and how he came to be awarded the Military Cross, remained a mystery to Chris and his family for nearly sixty years. In this emotional journey, Chris discovers that Basil was involved in some of WWII's most significant campaigns. 2014.