Winter Journey

by Diane Armstrong

In 1941, on a sunny July morning, 1,500 Jews living in and around Nowa Kalwaria, Poland, were rounded up, forced into a wooden barn and set on fire. In the town itself, blood puddled in the streets as Jews were pulled out of shops and homes and murdered.

At the opening of this book, the main character, Halina Shore, a forensic dentist affiliated with coroner’s office in Sydney, Australia, knows nothing of Nowa Kalwaria. Although she was born in Poland, she and her mother, Zosia Szczencinska, immigrated to Australia in 1947 when she was nine.

Halina’s seemingly perfect life is falling apart. She ended an eight-year-old relationship with a married lover, Rhys Evans, editor of an influential tabloid, when he published a damaging article about the coroner’s office. Halina, misled about the subject of the article, was quoted. Her boss reprimanded her. Then, testifying in a court case against a man Halina believes to be guilty of torturing and murdering a child, the jury was unconvinced and let him go.

Seeking a break, she decides to accept an invitation from the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland to join a team investigating a mass grave at Nowa Kalwaria. Their objective is to determine if the victims were killed by the Nazis – or by local Poles. As the Polish-born president of the International Association of Odontologists, Halina is the perfect candidate for this team and has experience with similar teams in other areas.

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.

The Tin Horse

by Janice Steinberg

Teenage poetry, children's drawings and wartime letters from her late husband confront attorney Elaine Greenstein Resnick as she packs the contents of her Santa Monica house to move to an assisted-living apartment.

More than the mementos or the professional documents being gathered up for archives at the University of Southern California, Elaine finds herself opening memories of her childhood spent in Jewish Boyle Heights decades earlier.

Every box lid she lifts takes her back to the small apartment with her Zayde, her parents, her fraternal twin sister Barbara and her younger sisters Audrey and Harriet. Nearby were her Uncle Leo, who owned a bookstore in Hollywood; his wife Sonya, and her Aunt Pearl, who scandalized her family by divorcing a two-timing husband and refusing to move back home.

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."

In the Image

by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's Jewish-themed book is lush with images and paradoxes.

Reading In the Image is like walking on a beach. If you focus on the details, you see shells and cabochons of surf-blasted glass. You smell the salty tang of the breeze ruffling your hair. You feel the sand scouring your feet. If you take the long view, you see the pulse of tides and blue-green water that touches every inch of shoreline on every continent. The vast connectedness of it humbles you.

Horn’s many-layered story ripples out from the lives of William Landsmann and Leora, his late granddaughter’s best friend. (The granddaughter, Naomi, was killed in a hit-and run accident in the New Jersey suburbs.) The book looks at Landsmann’s past – and Leora’s present.

Awake in the Dark

By Shira Nayman

Awake in the Dark is a fitting book to read in the darkening days of autumn as the pagans go searching for goblins, ghosts and witches.

You’ll find plenty of monsters in this collection of short stories, but you’ll also find plenty of people surviving the impossible with courage and strength. Every character in these stories is pushed into facing a truth about themselves and their origins that has either been kept secret – or which they have hidden from the world.

An address mumbled by a dying mother, a daughter's insistent questions about her mother's -- and thus her own -- origins or straightforward instructions left following a death, tear away the veil of secrecy and force the main characters in these tales to discover or reexamine who they are.