The Azrieli Foundation: 45 books

An epic journey across borders, The Vale of Tears chronicles close to two years in the life of Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung as he seeks an escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe. In this rare, near day-byday account, Rabbi Hirschprung illuminates what life was like for an Orthodox rabbi fleeing persecution,...

Rachel Milbauer, a vivacious and outgoing music lover, hid silently in an underground bunker in Nazi-occupied Poland for nearly two years. After the war, a recovered violin, case and photos hidden away by Rachel’s beloved Uncle Velvel became cherished symbols of survival and continuity. Saved by...

William Tannenzapf never wavered in his determination to survive and save his wife and baby girl from the evil that gripped his home town of Stanislawów. Blond, cherubic, Renate Krakauer was a “miracle baby” born as the world descended into war and soon surrounded by misery and death. Starved...

Almost forty years after the end of the end of the war, Claire Baum opens a package from a stranger in Rotterdam, unleashing a flood of repressed memories from her childhood. As Claire delves into her past, she uncovers the personal sacrifice and bravery of her parents, the Dutch resistance and the families that selflessly gave shelter to her and her sister, Ollie.

For six desperate years, Willie Sterner’s skill as a painter saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis. Faced with inhumane conditions in slave labour camps and grieving the loss of his close-knit family, Sterner relied on courage and ingenuity to hold onto his dignity. Through almost random...

Ann Szedlecki was a Hollywood-film-loving fourteen-year-old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and she fled to the Soviet Union with her older brother, hoping to return for the rest of her family later. Instead, she ended up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union,...

When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zduńska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical...

Born two hundred kilometres away from each other and two years apart, Zsuzsanna Fischer and Eva Steinberger are both thrown into chaos when Germany occupies Hungary and destroys their peaceful childhoods. In the spring of 1944, as Zsuzsanna and Eva are sent into ghettos and then to Auschwitz, they...

"How much longer could we last?" sixteen-year-old Amek Adler laments, after arriving at yet one more concentration camp in the spring of 1945. From the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos to the Radom forced labour camp, and from the Natzweiler concentration camp to Dachau, Amek has witnessed too much...

David Newman’s gifts as a musician and a teacher carried him through years of brutality during the war. Torn from his family in Poland and deported for forced labour at Skarżysko- Kamienna, David battled desperation and the mounting death toll by writing songs, poems and satires about life in the...

Hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Slovakia’s Low Tatra Mountains in the fall of 1944, in constant danger from the Germans occupying nearby villages, fourteen-year-old Agnes Grossmann and her family made the daring decision to escape high into the mountains and hike along treacherous ice-covered...

Arthur Ney, a twelve-year-old smuggler outside the Warsaw ghetto walls when the ghetto uprising began in the spring of 1943, fled to the countryside with false papers to work on a farm. Almost a year later, he returned to Warsaw and faced the realization that his family was gone. Under the protection...

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words...

As Hitler’s army swept into Czechoslovakia in 1939, Anka Voticky, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, her husband, Arnold, and her family fled halfway around the world to an unlikely refuge – the Chinese port of Shanghai. Estranged from all that was familiar, their security was threatened yet...