Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane

The story takes place in 1954 on Shutter Island, home to a psychiatric hospital called Ashecliffe. U.S. Deputy Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando, who had committed multiple murders. The deputy marshals search the island for the patient as a hurricane bears down on them, and they find that the hospital has practiced sinister measures during its existence.

The Return of the Dancing Master - Henning Mankell

From Publishers Weekly
Mankell, known in this country for his Kurt Wallander police procedurals (Faceless Killers; The Dogs of Riga), sets this intricate, stand-alone tale of murder and intrigue in the vast pine forests of north-central Sweden. Stefan Lindman, a 37-year-old policeman in the city of Boras, sees his life, both professional and personal, as absolutely ordinary. Then he discovers a strange lump on his tongue; it's cancer, and his life changes dramatically. At the doctor's office he picks up a discarded newspaper and reads that former colleague Herbert Molin has been murdered in the northern forests. Because Lindman needs to take his mind off his upcoming cancer treatment, he decides to investigate Molin's death. As the details of the crime come to light, Lindman realizes he never knew the real Molin. The plot involves the secret world of Nazis, both past and present. The prose can be cold and spare, at least in translation: "There was a smell of paint in the house. All the lights were on. Lindman had to bow his head when he entered through the door." The unrelenting Lindman turns out to be an innovative investigator, though those seeking fast-paced action rather than meticulous introspection will be disappointed. Secrets are slowly and methodically teased from the evidence, and by the satisfying end readers with a taste for the unusual will find Lindman, and the mystery he solves, not in the least bit ordinary.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Auschwitz and After - Charlotte Delbo

Auschwitz and After (Auschwitz, et après) is a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau by Charlotte Delbo. Delbo, who had returned to occupied France to work in the French resistance alongside her husband, was sent to the camp for her activities. Her memoir uses unconventional, almost experimental, narrative techniques to not only convey the experience of Auschwitz but how she and her fellow survivors coped in the years afterwards.

Auschwitz and After is really a trilogy of separately published shorter works: "None of Us Will Return" (Aucun de nous ne reviendra), "Useless Knowledge" (La connaissance inutile), and "The Measure of Our Days" (Mesure des nos jours). The first and last volumes deal with Auschwitz as lived and remembered, respectively, and do not entirely follow linear time. The middle volume concerns the surviving Frenchwomen's slow journey back to freedom after they were moved from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and ultimately turned over to the Swedish Red Cross, and is somewhat more linear.

"O You Who Know," ("Vous qui saviez") a poem early in the trilogy, challenges the reader with the inadequacy of what they already understand:

O you who know
Could you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle?
While thirst makes them dim?
You who know
Could you know that you can see your mother dead
Without shedding a tear?
You who know
Could you know how in the morning you crave death
Only to fear it by evening?
"Horror cannot be circumscribed," she concludes, and throughout the trilogy she regularly expresses doubt as to whether she can truly tell the reader what it was like, whether anyone can.

You don't believe what we say
because
if what we say were true
we wouldn't be here to say it.
we'd have to explain
the inexplicable
"I am not sure that what I wrote is true," she wrote in the epigraph to the first volume, "I am certain that it is truthful." Resolving those two statements makes reading Auschwitz and After an advanced reading experience that more are slowly discovering.

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer - Irene Gut Opdyke with Jennifer Armstrong

When World War II began, Irene Gutowna was a 17-year-old Polish nursing student. Six years later, she writes in this inspiring memoir, "I felt a million years old." In the intervening time she was separated from her family, raped by Russian soldiers, and forced to work in a hotel serving German officers. Sickened by the suffering inflicted on the local Jews, Irene began leaving food under the walls of the ghetto. Soon she was scheming to protect the Jewish workers she supervised at the hotel, and then hiding them in the lavish villa where she served as housekeeper to a German major. When he discovered them in the house, Gutowna became his mistress to protect her friends--later escaping him to join the Polish partisans during the Germans' retreat. The author presents her extraordinary heroism as the inevitable result of small steps taken over time, but her readers will not agree as they consume this thrilling adventure story, which also happens to be a drama of moral choice and courage. Although adults will find Irene's tale moving, it is appropriately published as a young adult book. Her experiences while still in her teens remind adolescents everywhere that their actions count, that the power to make a difference is in their hands.

Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust - by ZOSIA GOLDBERG as told by HILTON OBENZINGER

A fellow Jew within the Warsaw Ghetto, offended by Zosia Goldberg's unaccented Polish, spat at her in Yiddish: "May you die amongst the goyem!" Zosia took this "curse" as a message from God. It sparked her escape from the Ghetto, convincing her that only by posing as a Gentile could she survive.

And Zosia did not die amongst the goyem-but nearly. She was a "débrouillarde": she ran through fire without getting burned. Her story features resistance at every turn, narrow escapes, and help from the most unlikely sources. At times suffering bitter betrayals by fellow Jews, she also encountered unexpected sympathies from some Nazis themselves. Zosia's story is as much a chronicle of the Holocaust as it is everywoman's struggle against human folly and depravity.

"Running Through Fire is a book filled with unspeakable horrors-but it is told without a shred of self-pity. Zosia Goldberg never complains, never bemoans her lot. She battles and endures, and in this raw, unvarnished tale of human suffering, she has given us a manual of hope."-from the introduction by Paul Auster

After surviving WW II, Zosia Goldberg came to the United States, married, then moved to Caracas, Venezuela, to operate a garment business. She returned to America after her husband's death and currently resides in Florida. She has one son.

Hilton Obenzinger (Preface) is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a recipient of the American Book Award. He teaches American literature and honors writing at Stanford University.

The Girl in the Red Coat - Roma Ligocka

As a young child, in the Krakow ghetto, Ligocka was known to everyone by the strawberry-red coat she always wore-an image that Steven Spielberg would use in Schindler's List, without knowing anything about Ligocka herself. Determined to tell her own story, Ligocka gives a harrowing, impressionistic account of her early memories of the ghetto: the men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, the endless waiting in lines, people shot indiscriminately and her grandmother's seizure by SS officers while Ligocka hides under a table. Ligocka and her mother sneak out of the ghetto and are taken in by a Polish family; her father, taken to Auschwitz, escapes several years later. In a poignant episode, the little girl doesn't recognize this haggard specter who wants to embrace her. The memoir also describes Ligocka's youth in Communist Krakow: her career as an actress in theater and films, her struggle as an adult to confront her frightful memories and the weathering of new crises, from the passing of her parents to political turmoil in Poland. Though Ligocka's rendering of her early childhood voice isn't quite seamless (it sometimes sounds forced and too knowing), this doesn't take away from the power of her narrative, and readers may be particularly interested in her experiences as one of a tiny handful of Jewish survivors in Communist Poland.

Sarah’s Key - Tatiana de Rosnay

Paris. Spring 1942. The Vel’ d’ Hiv’ (Operation Spring Breeze). Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah’s Key revolves around this deplorable historic event. Operation Spring Breeze was a French-led “round-up” of more than 13,000 Parisian Jews (mostly women and children) under order of the Nazis. Initially kept in inhumane conditions at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (an indoor cycle track), these victims of the Holocaust were eventually moved to concentration camps inside France (where they were guarded by French gendarmes) and later moved to Auschwitz where they were slaughtered. The roundup accounted for more than a quarter of the 42,000 Jews sent from France to Auschwitz. The Vel’ d’ Hiv’ has become of symbol of national shame in France.

De Rosnay has created a work of fiction which imagines a child caught in the round-up and how that one moment in history can have repercussions far into the future.

She closed the door on the little white face, turned the key in the lock. Then she slipped the key into her pocket. The lock was hidden by a pivoting device shaped like a light switch. It was impossible to see the outline of the cupboard in the paneling of the wall. Yes, he’d be safe there. She was sure of it. The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel. “I’ll come back for you later. I promise.” -From Sarah’s Key, page 9