WWII Books

🔈 Tells the story of Julian's grandma's childhood as she, a Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II and how the boy she once shunned became her savior and best friend

🔈 Actor, author, and activist George Takei recounts his childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II and the impact the experience had on his later life.

In his signature art style, Hendrix tells the gripping account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister who joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

3 copies

🔈 A memoir about Vladek Spiegleman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and about his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his story, and with history itself. Cartoon format portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

A graphic adaptation of the diary penned by Anne Frank, a girl whose family was in hiding from the Nazis. It remains faithful to the original, while the stunning illustrations interpret and add layers of visual meaning and immediacy to this classic work of Holocaust literature. 

At the Sáevres Children's Home outside Paris, Rachel Cohen has discovered her passion--photography. Although she hasn't heard from her parents in months, she loves the people at her school, adores capturing what she sees in pictures, and tries not to worry too much about Hitler's war. But as France buckles under the Nazi regime, danger closes in, and Rachel must change her name and go into hiding. 

35 copies

🔈 In 1936 Berlin, fourteen-year-old Karl Stern, considered Jewish despite a non-religious upbringing, learns to box from the legendary Max Schmeling while struggling with the realities of the Holocaust.

14 copies

🔈 From her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken with other blond, blue-eyed children to a school in Poland to be trained as "proper Germans" for adoption by German families, but all the while she remembers her true name and history.

151 copies

🔈 In an attempt to save his daughter's life, Eva's father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her sister survive the war.

2 copies

🔈 Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.

3 copies

🔈 From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation. (Novel in Verse)

14 copies

🔈 Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called "Out-With" in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence.

2 copies

Hannah resents stories of her Jewish heritage and of the past until, when opening the door during a Passover Seder, she finds herself in Poland during World War II where she experiences the horrors of a concentration camp, and learns why she-- and we--need to remember the past.

5 copies

🔈 Based on the life of Jack Gruener, this book relates his story of survival from the Nazi occupation of Krakow, when he was eleven, through a succession of concentration camps, to the final liberation of Dachau.

In Poland in the 1940s, twins Chaim and Gittel rely on each other to endure life in a ghetto, escape through forests, and the horrors of a concentration camp.

A fictional account of life with Anne Frank hidden in the secret annex from Peter's point-of-view, following as he becomes closer with Anne, begins to question his own religion, and is forced to suppress his own desires to join the fight.

1 copy

In May 1940, Anne Frank is a young girl not quite eleven with all the ordinary problems of a little sister, but Amsterdam is about to be invaded by Nazis and after that everything changes.

Tells the story of Irena Sendler, a courageous Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

15 copies

🔈 A biography of Jack Mandelbaum, who survived Nazi concentration camps when he was a teenager.

5 copies

Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood.

2 copies

The incredible true story of Michael Bornstein--who at age 4 was one of the youngest children to be liberated from Auschwitz--and of his family

5 copies

🔈 It is 1943, and thirteen-year-old Michael O'Shaunessey, son of the Irish ambassador to Nazi Germany in Berlin, is also a spy for the British Secret Service, so he has joined the Hitler Youth, and pretends that he agrees with their violence.

4 copies

🔈 In Nazi-occupied Norway, fourteen-year-old Espen joins the resistance movement, graduating from deliverer of illegal newspapers to courier and spy.

15 copies

🔈 In October 1942, seventeen-year-old Helmuth Hübener, imprisoned for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, recalls his past life and how he came to dedicate himself to bring the truth about Hitler and the war to the German people.

34 copies

🔈 Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

4 copies

🔈 In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland, a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos. When a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.

Kidnapped by her own mother, a Nazi spy, teenaged Wendy is transported from Maine to wartime Berlin, where she secretly supports the resistance movement and learns a family secret.

10 copies

In a Polish ghetto, Max Rosen and his sister, Zena, struggle to live after their father is taken away by the Nazis. With barely enough food to survive, the siblings make a daring escape from Nazi soldiers into the nearby forest. 

3 copies

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

1 copy

In 1943 Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, teenage Hanneke--a 'finder' of black market goods--is tasked with finding a Jewish girl a customer had been hiding, who has seemingly vanished into thin air, and is pulled into a web of resistance activities and secrets as she attempts to solve the mystery and save the missing girl.

American soldiers, aided by an Austrian colonel who was both an Olympian and a trainer of Lipizzaners, attempt to kidnap horses that had been taken by Nazis "for the glorification of the Third Reich" and smuggle them to safety.

Details the mission of young Norwegian commandos to destroy Vemork, an industrial fortress that was occupied by German troops during World War II. Armed with little more than skis, explosives, and great courage, the commandos will survive months in the snowy wilderness, elude a huge manhunt, and execute two dangerous missions. 

Tells the story of a group of boy resistance fighters in Denmark after the Nazi invasion during World War II.

3 copies

🔈 The true story of the White Rose, a group of students in Nazi Germany who were active undercover agents of the resistance movement against Hitler and his regime

A biography of pastor, activist, and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer with emphasis on his participation in a plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

A nonfiction chronicle of the courageous efforts of remarkable young women recruited by the US government to crack German and Japanese military codes during World War II.

6 copies

🔈 A photo-illustrated look at the youth organizations Adolf Hitler founded and used to meet his sociopolitical and military ends; includes profiles of individual Hitler Youth members as well as young people who opposed the Nazis, such as Hans and Sophie Scholl.

5 copies

🔈 On April 1, 1945 with the battle of Okinawa beginning, fourteen-year-old native Okinawan Hideki, drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps, is handed two grenades and told to go kill American soldiers; his struggle across the island will finally bring him face-to-face with Ray, a marine in his very first battle--and the choice he makes then will change his life forever.

5 copies

🔈 It is June 6, 1944, D-Day, and Dee Carpenter (true name Dietrich Zimmermann), an underage private in the United States Army, is headed for Omaha Beach, seeking revenge for his uncle, who was arrested by Nazis when Dee was a little boy; meanwhile, Samira Zidano, an eleven-year old French-Algerian girl is looking for the French resistance, desperate to deliver the message that the invasion is about to begin.

11 copies

🔈 After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.

18 copies

🔈 Nick's father and others are taken prisoner when his plantation in Burma is invaded by the Japanese in 1941, leaving Nick and his friend Mya to risk their lives in order to free them from the POW camp.

4 copies

🔈 During World War II, a light-skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

4 copies

🔈 Gustave, having been forced to move from Paris to the countryside after his parents decided it was not safe for Jews to live in the city during World War II, meets a Catholic girl named Nicole, whose family is part of the French Resistance, and together they devise a plan to rescue his friend and family members from the Nazi occupied territory.

2 copies

🔈 Tomikazu Nakaji's biggest concerns are baseball, homework, and a local bully, until life with his Japanese family in Hawaii changes drastically after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

9 copies

🔈 After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thirteen-year-old Tetsu and his family are sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona where a fellow prisoner starts a baseball team, but when Tetsu's sister becomes ill and he feels responsible, he stops playing.

 🔈 Lizzie and Karl's mother, Mutti, working at a local zoo in Dresden, Germany, during World War II while their father is away fighting in France, brings home Marlene, a baby elephant that is slated to be destroyed as the Allied bombing grows closer, and when they are forced to flee, Mutti feels they must take Marlene with them, adding even more danger to their journey.

🔈 In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

 🔈 In 1940, a group of British children, their escorts, and some sailors struggle to survive in a lifeboat when the ship taking them to safety in Canada is torpedoed. Includes historical notes. (Novel in Verse)

🔈 With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

2 copies

🔈 A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.

10 copies

Eleven-year-old Danny Crane witnesses the bombing of Pearl Harbor and must find his way home in the midst of the terror, smoke, and chaos of the attack.

1 copy

As World War II draws to a close, refugees try to escape the war's final dangers, only to find themselves aboard a ship with a target on its hull.

2 copies

🔈 Shares the true story of a young girl who survived the atomic bomb and chronicles her long journey to find peace.

A true story of courage, survival, and the power of music to uplift the human spirit, this compelling tribute to one special young woman and the lives she touched will both educate and inspire young readers.

6 copies

🔈 Twelve-year-old Edith is sent from her home in Germany in 1938 to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago, Illinois, and escape Nazi persecution, but as she struggles to assimilate into American society, Edith worries about her parents and mourns the loss of everything she has known. 

🔈 The author shares the story of the life-transforming journey she took with her mother, Edith, to Germany in an attempt to help Edith rediscover the culture, traditions, and friends lost when she was sent by her parents to America in 1938 to protect her from the Nazi onslaught.

10 copies

🔈 Examines the history of the atomic bomb, discussing the discovery of the behavior of uranium when placed next to radioactive material, the race to build a bomb, and the impact of the weapon on societies around the world.

From the freezing wilderness confines of a labor camp all the way north near the White Sea to hunger-filled years of displacement all the way south in the city of Turkestan, Uri recounts the lucky breaks and setbacks that happened to him and his parents along the way

2 copies

🔈 Presents the history of the group of spies, Holocaust survivors, and lawyers who pursued Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, for fifteen years in order to bring him to justice for his leadership role in the killing of thousands of Jews during World War II.

3 copies

A biography of Olympic runner and World War II bombardier, Louis Zamperini, who had been rambunctious in childhood before succeeding in track and eventually serving in the military, which led to a trial in which he was forced to find a way to survive in the open ocean after being shot down.

🔈 Joe Louis was born in a sharecropper's shack in Alabama and raised in a Detroit tenement. Max Schmeling grew up in poverty in Hamburg, Germany. For both boys, boxing was a way out and a way up. Little did they know someday they would face each other in a pair of battles that would capture the imagination of the world.