LibGuides: History: World War II and the Rise of Nazism

Video: Schindler's List

The story of German entrepreneur (and Nazi) Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, who saved the lives of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg's classic brilliantly captures experiences representative of those of millions of European Jews during the Holocaust. The movie features fine performances by Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley. It is deftly filmed and hauntingly scored. It is a compelling tale of intolerance, and has wide educational applications.

Production Year: 1993

Duration: 3:05:31

Video: Life Is Beautiful

In 1930s Italy, an open-minded Jewish Italian bookshop owner employs his fertile imagination to shield his young son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp.

Production Year: 1997

Duration: 1:51:45

Video: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

A Holocaust drama, the film explores the horror of a World War II extermination camp through the eyes of two eight-year-old boys, one the son of the camp's Nazi commandant, the other a Jewish inmate.

Production Year: 2008

Duration: 1:26:38

Video: The Teacher Who Defied Hitler

It was an oasis in the heart of hell. In the mid-1930s, as the wheels of Hitler's Final Solution began rolling towards mass genocide, a Jewish school blossomed in the heart of Nazi Berlin. Functioning in plain sight of Nazi officials, the Goldschmidt Schule became a refuge and a place of safety for hundreds of Jewish children.

Production Year: 2013

Duration: 45:58

Fiction books in the NCC

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
ISBN: 9780739337059
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.
All That I Am by Anna Funder
ISBN: 9780143567516
Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past - and a part of history that has been all but forgotten. Another lifetime away, it's 1939 and the world is going to war...
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
ISBN: 9781743515860
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read.
The Auschwitz Violin by Maia Angels Anglada
ISBN: 9781921758874
An international sensation, The Auschwitz Violin is the unforgettable story of one man’s refusal to surrender his dignity in the face of history’s greatest atrocity.
Once by Morris Gleitzman
ISBN: 9780143301950
The story of a young Jewish boy who is determined to escape the orphanage he lives in to save his Jewish parents from the Nazis in the occupied Poland of the Second World War.
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
ISBN: 9781405258210
In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
ISBN: 9780141014081
Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist, coming to terms with his father's story. An astonishing retelling of the twentieth-century's grisliest news, Maus studies the bloody paw-prints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.

Biographies and non-fiction in the NCC

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
ISBN: 9780141315195
In July 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, went into hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two years Anne vividly describes not only the daily frustrations of living in such close quarters, but also her thoughts, feelings and longings as she grows up. Her diary ends abruptly and tragically when, in August 1944, Anne and her family were all finally betrayed.
Gazing at the stars: Memories of a child survivor by Eva Slonim
ISBN: 9781863956543
These events, the persecution of my people, have simply become part of the collection of facts that people now call 'history'. I lived these facts every day. They are part of my memory. 'History' tells us that the Jews of Bratislava were persecuted by the invading Nazis. What it doesn't tell us is how it feels, as a nine-year-old girl, to have your bicycle forced from your hands, confiscated by a soldier while your father watches, powerless.
If This Is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi
ISBN: 9780349100135
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 and trained as chemist. Arrested a member of the anti-fascist resistance during the war, he was deported to Auschwitz. His experiences there are described in his two classic autobiographical works, "If This Is a Man" and "The Truce".
Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine by Peter FitzSimons
ISBN: 9780732269197
In the early 1930s, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naïve journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that momement she declared she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazi presence.
The Boy on the Wooden Box by Leon Leyson
ISBN: 9781471119675
Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis. This, the only memoir published by a former Schindler's List child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable.
Elly - My True Story of the Holocaust by Elly Berkovits Gross
ISBN: 9780545074940
Told in short, gripping chapters, this is an unforgettable true story of survival. At just 15, Elly, her mother and her brother were taken from their Romanian town to the Auschwitz-II/Birkenau concentration camp. When they arrived at Auschwitz, a soldier waved Elly to the right; her mother and brother to the left. She never saw her family alive again.