New Books!

Gottesfeld, Jeff. The Tree in the Courtyard: Looking Through Anne Frank's Window. (Peter McCarty, Illustrator.) NY: Knopf Books, 2016.

Told from the perspective of the tree outside Anne Frank's window—and illustrated by a Caldecott Honor artist—this book introduces her story in a gentle and incredibly powerful way to a young audience.

The tree in the courtyard was a horse chestnut. Her leaves were green stars; her flowers foaming cones of white and pink. Seagulls flocked to her shade. She spread roots and reached skyward in peace.

The tree watched a little girl, who played and laughed and wrote in a diary. When strangers invaded the city and warplanes roared overhead, the tree watched the girl peek out of the curtained window of the annex. It watched as she and her family were taken away—and when her father returned after the war, alone.

The tree died the summer Anne Frank would have turned eighty-one, but its seeds and saplings have been planted around the world as a symbol of peace. Its story, and Anne’s story, are beautifully told and illustrated in this powerful picture book.

Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945. NY: Basic Books, 2015. 

As early as 1941, Allied victory in World War II seemed all but assured. How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years?

In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials—personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence—to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people—from infantrymen and tank commanders on the Eastern front to civilians on the home front—to vivid life. While most historians identify the German defeat at Stalingrad as the moment when the average German citizen turned against the war effort, Stargardt demonstrates that the Wehrmacht in fact retained the staunch support of the patriotic German populace until the bitter end.

Astonishing in its breadth and humanity, The German War is a groundbreaking new interpretation of what drove the Germans to fight—and keep fighting—for a lost cause.

Tornillo, Louis. What Do You Know About the Holocaust? Race and Genocide. FL: BookLocker.com, 2015. 

Written by a former public school teacher, What Do You Know is organized around an interactive quiz that tests the reader's knowledge, followed by short essays which deeply explore key events and issues with rich historical detail. It focuses on the racial ideology that drove the Holocaust, and links it to the racism that is still a potent force in our own society. "What Do You Know About The Holocaust? Race and Genocide" will surprise and provoke readers.

New Books in the Holocaust Center's Library

Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg. Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree. Ill. Erika Steiskal. IN: The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. 2015. 

"In most windows I saw people working and children playing. When the soldiers came, people began covering their windows, so I couldn't see inside anymore. But the tiny attic window of the narrow brick house behind Otto Frank's business offices had no shade. For a long time the rooms were empty. Then one day, Otto's whole family came to live there. They called their new home the Secret Annex..."

A story of Anne Frank, who loved a tree and the tree who promised never to forget her.


This book is co-published with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, chosen by the Anne Frank Center as the first U.S. recipient of a sapling from the tree outside of the Secret Annex window (the tree is the narrator in the book). Recommended for ages 6-9.  Thank you to Bob Evans for donating this book to the Holocaust Center's Library.

Douglas, Lawrence. The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. NJ: Princeton University Press. 2016.

In 2009, Harper’s Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was twice stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.


An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history. Thank you Nick Coddington for donating this signed copy to the Holocaust Center's library.  

Helm, Sarah. Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women. NY: Doubleday, 2014.

Months before the outbreak of World War II, Heinrich Himmler—prime architect of the Holocaust—designed a special concentration camp for women, located fifty miles north of Berlin. Only a small number of the prisoners were Jewish. Ravensbrück was primarily a place for the Nazis to hold other inferior beings: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Resistance fighters, lesbians, prostitutes, and aristocrats—even the sister of New York’s Mayor LaGuardia. Over six years the prisoners endured forced labor, torture, starvation, and random execution. In the final months of the war, Ravensbrück became an extermination camp. Estimates of the final death toll have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000.

For decades the story of Ravensbrück was hidden behind the Iron Curtain. Now, using testimony unearthed since the end of the Cold War and interviews with survivors who have never talked before, Sarah Helm takes us into the heart of the camp. The result is a landmark achievement that weaves together many accounts, following figures on both sides of the prisoner/guard divide. Chilling, compelling, and deeply necessary, Ravensbrück is essential reading for anyone concerned with Nazi history. Thank you K. Kennell for donating this book to the Holocaust Center's library. 

Hornby, Elfi. Dancing to War. WA: The First World Publishing, 1997.

In this, her first book, the author recounts her incredible experiences as she, a sixteen-year-old dancer, was being sent to the worst battle zone of WW II—the Russian front in mid minter of 1943—to entertain German troops. Under the thumb of an unsympathetic, exploitative director, she faces unimaginable hardships and challenges, witnesses the horrors of war, meets many of its heroes and villains and is forced to rethink all she had been taught about life, country and God. She and her colleagues barely escape, riding in a cattle car back to Berlin.


The book brims with action and adventure, and is amply sprinkled with both laughter and tears. It offers a rare glimpse of war from “the other side.” Thank you to Dr. and Mrs. Elie Levy for donating this book to the Holocaust Center's library.