Let Me Go / Helga Schneider 166 p.

Helga Schneider was four when her mother left her family to do the Nazi party's work.  Her mother became a member of the SS and served as a guard at concentration camps, eventually Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a unit responsible for so many acts of torture.  Thirty-seven years since the first time she had seen her mother since 1941, her mother is now in a nursing home.  Helga seeks to find answers but her mother is still an ardent support of the Nazi party’s work.  This is very difficult read as Helga intersperses the interchange with her memories of wartime Berlin, quotes from official reports, and her knowledge of the torture in the camps.  Even jail time has not mitigated her mother's exuberant support of the SS horrific work.  

Terezin: Voices from the Holocaust / Ruth Thomson 64 p.

The Jewish people tell their story of life in a transit Nazi ghetto established in Terezin, Czechoslovakia, a small fortress town built by the Austrian emperor Joseph II and named for his mother, Maria Theresa.  Terezin, renamed Theresienstadt, became the Nazi’s ‘model’ camp when the Danish king requested a Red Cross visit to view living conditions when Danish Jews were transported there since rumors were circulating about the killing of Jews.  Of course the visitors were carefully guided through after an intense beautification process.  Later, this was filmed by the inmates using inmate actors to further perpetuate how good the Nazis treated the Jews.  Ruth Thomson has the inmates speaking for themselves through their secret diaries, artwork, and excerpts from memoirs and recordings made after the war.   Period photographs, reproductions of menu cards, concert tickets, and posters appear with color photographs of the town as it is today are included.

2012 Notable Children's Books