NCW Libraries

"October 1944: In the long, narrow undressing rooms in Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoner Jakub Bak toils under the scrutiny of SS guards. Like other members of the Sonderkommando, Jakub was selected on arrival for an unthinkable job: sorting through the clothes of the dead and moving their bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums. In this hell within a hell, Jakub clings to the promise he made to his murdered father--to live, at any cost--and to...

"A spellbinding murder mystery with the plotting and characterization of Louise Penny or Agatha Christie set in Auschwitz at Christmas, 1943"-- Provided by publisher.

"In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism--but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion....

Filmed in 1955 at Auschwitz, Alain Resnais combines color footage with black and white newsreels and stills to tell the story of not just the Holocaust, but the horror of man's brutal inhumanity.

"When the head of the women's camp appoints Alma as the conductor of the orchestra, performing for prisoners trudging to work as well as the highest-ranking Nazis, Alma refuses: 'they can kill me but they won't make me play'. Yet she soon realizes the power this position offers: she can provide starving girls with extra rations and save many from the clutches of death. This is how Alma meets Miklos, a talented pianist. Surrounded by despair, they...

"From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father' s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself...

What makes one person a survivor? Return to Auschwitz: The Survival of Vladimir Munk is the moving story of a Czech Holocaust survivor and retired SUNY Plattsburgh professor Vladimir Munk. The film follows Vladimir, now 95, as he returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, the camp where he was held prisoner during World War II. It will be his last chance to honor thirty of his close relatives, including his parents, who perished...

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Auslander is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find...

Fania Fenelon is a Jewish cabaret singer in Paris during the Nazi invasion. Fania and thousands of other Jewish and political prisoners are sent to the Auschwitz death camp. She and a group of other classical musicians are spared from death in exchange for performing music for their captors. They are also ordered to play for the thousands being herded to the gas chambers, a 'humane' means of easing the condemned into the next world.