Sarah’s Key

 By Tatiana de Rosnay

The event that turns the plot of Sarah’s Key is the July 16 and 17, 1942, mass arrests of Jewish men, women and children in Paris, and their detention in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris.

Decreed by the Nazis, the roundup was executed by French police, using Paris city buses and the “Winter Velodrome” bicycling racetrack and stadium built near the Eiffel Tower by Henri Desgrange, who later organized the Tour de France.

The Vél d’Hiv round up captured 13,152 victims – men, women and 4,051 children. There were no functioning lavatories and just one water tap. The limited food and water available was brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and the few doctors and nurses allowed to enter.

Five days later they were then taken to internment camps at Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz.

Bloodlines – Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial

By Anthony Platt

The physical typescript of the Nuremberg Laws – from their discovery by two Jewish American soldiers in Eichstätt, Germany, in 1945 to their first public exhibition in 1999 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles – is the focus of Anthony Platt’s riveting book, Bloodlines.

Platt, a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, was on sabbatical with his partner and co-author Cecelia O’Leary doing research at the Huntington Library in 1999.

His curiosity was aroused by the controversy stirred by the Huntington’s announcement that it was loaning an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws to the new Skirball Cultural Center. Received by the library from Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., in June 1945, the documents had been out of sight in the Huntington’s vault 54 years.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

By Erik Larson

At the start of one of the most critical periods in U.S.-German relations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself unable to find a candidate willing to accept the role of ambassador to Germany in 1933.

Germany was volatile and the assignment oxymoronic: do what you can to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany unofficially while maintaining cordial official diplomatic relations.

Wiser, more experienced men than Professor William E. Dodd, who ultimately accepted the position, turned the post down.

Triangle

By Katharine Weber

On March 25, the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will be observed. The fire, which broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, killed 146 workers, mostly women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. It was the 9/11 of its time.

The tragedy spurred major reforms in working conditions in New York City’s sweatshops and helped unions gain acceptance.

Triangle tells the story in three voices. Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the fire at 106, is heard from only indirectly through interviews and trial transcripts. She has kept key secrets for a lifetime. Ruth Zion is a self-serving feminist researcher with a nose for missing information and an astute ability to suggest what fits into the blanks. Internationally renowned composer George Botkin marries Esther’s granddaughter, Rebecca, a genetic researcher.

The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

Author Rachel Kadish bridges nearly four centuries to connect two strong women who have made heavy sacrifices to pursue a life of the mind.

Starchy Helen Watt is in the twilight of a career as a professor and researcher of Jewish history. Facing retirement and in failing health, she has seen much, been disappointed often and expects little from the world.

Her heart and her hopes lift when a former student calls her to evaluate a cache of ancient documents found in cubby hole beneath a staircase in a house he is renovating. When she sees the pages, written in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish and dated from 1657 to 1665, she knows the find is significant.

Hunting Eichmann; How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi

by Neal Bascomb

The movie, "Operation Finale" (2018), has exposed new generations to the search for and daring capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960.

For all of its excellent performances -- notably Ben Kingsley as Eichmann and Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin -- the movie plays fast and loose with a number of details and fails to do justice to the painstaking planning and great risk  involved in bringing Eichmann to trial in Israel.

While the Nuremberg trials prosecuted some 200 of the leaders of the Nazi party, the Reich Cabinet, Schutzstaffel (SS), the Gestapo and "General Staff and High Command" of the German military, Adolph Eichmann remained at-large 15 years after the war.

History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier

by Deborah E. Lipstadt, PhD

If you’re planning to see the movie “Denial” (2016), starring Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall, you must read History on Trial. It’s the book on which the movie is based.

The story is a courtroom thriller based on the 1996 libel suit that author David Irving brought against historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for publishing Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Irving, author of more than 30 books on World War II, including The Destruction of Dresden, Hitler’s War, Churchill’s War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, has repeatedly alleged that because no one can produce a written document from Hitler ordering the extermination of the Jews, there was no formal, organized genocide.

The Spinoza Problem

by Irvin D. Yalom, MD

In alternating chapters, author Irving Yalom tells the stories of Alfred Rosenberg, who put Hitler's theories of racial superiority into words for the masses, and Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 for his belief in rationalism.

Rosenberg's ideas helped the Nazis justify genocide and was hung after his conviction at Nuremberg. Spinoza was a rationalist who laid the foundations of the Enlightenment and modern thought.

The historical Alfred Rosenberg removed Spinoza's library from the Spinoza Museum in Rijnsburg, Holland, because, he said, the books were of "great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem."

The Fifth Servant

by Kenneth Wishnia

It’s the eve of both the sabbath and Passover, when the assistant synagogue caretaker (shammes) Benyamin Ben-Akiva is called from sleep by the broken cry of a girl’s name. It’s 1592 and Benyamin is a Talmudic scholar recently arrived in Prague from Poland.

The city is a simmering stew of superstition, ignorance, bitter prejudices and conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Emperor Rudolph II’s tolerance of the Jewish people has allowed a fragile refuge inside the gates of the Jewish ghetto. But with preparations for Passover and Easter happening elbow-to-elbow, tensions are high.