All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops—including the man who was to become her husband—in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey.

Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead.

Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

Ukrainian insurgents sided with the Germans after they invaded the Soviet Union, but ended up participating in massacres of Jews rather than front-line service against the Russians.

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, is probably the most comprehensive volume on Auschwitz in print. Essays by leading scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States document the history of the camp, the technology and magnitude of the genocide that occurred there, profiles of the inmates and the Nazis who ran the camp (such as Joseph Mengele), the underground resistance that arose, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when. It's not a book to read straight through because of the sheer volume of information (more than 600 pages of text) and the horror of its contents. But it's the best resource for answering a wide variety of questions about the camp, especially those raised by the many excellent memoirs by the survivors. —Michael Joseph Gross

The diary as Anne Frank wrote it. At last, in a  new translation, this definitive edition contains  entries about Anne's burgeoning sexuality and  confrontations with her mother that were cut from  previous editions. Anne Frank's The Diary of a  Young Girl is among the most enduring  documents of the twentieth century. Since its  publication in 1947, it has been a beloved and deeply  admired monument to the indestructible nature of the  human spirit, read by millions of people and  translated into more than fifty-five languages.  Doubleday, which published the first English translation  of the diary in 1952, now offers a new translation  that captures Anne's youthful spirit and restores  the original material omitted by Anne's father,  Otto — approximately thirty percent of the diary.  The elder Frank excised details about Anne's  emerging sexuality, and about the often-stormy relations  between Anne and her mother. Anne Frank and her  family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation  forces, hid in the back of an Amsterdam office building  for two years. This is Anne's record of that time.  She was thirteen when the family went into the  "Secret Annex," and in these pages, she grows  to be a young woman and proves to be an insightful  observer of human nature as well. A timeless story  discovered by each new generation, The  Diary of a Young Girl stands without peer.  For young readers and adults, it continues to  bring to life this young woman, who for a time  survived the worst horrors the modern world had seen — and  who remained triumphantly and heartbreakingly  human throughout her ordeal.