"Nobody leaves Auschwitz alive. Mala, inmate 19880, understood that the moment she stepped off the cattle train into the depths of hell. As an interpreter for the SS, she uses her position to save as many lives as she can, smuggling scraps of bread to those desperate with hunger. Edward, inmate 531, is a camp veteran and a political prisoner. Though he looks like everyone else, with a shaved head and striped uniform, he's a fighter in the underground...

September 1940. Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki deliberately walked into a Nazi German street round-up in Warsaw and became Auschwitz Prisoner No. 4859. He had volunteered for a secret undercover mission: smuggle out intelligence about the new German concentration camp, and build a resistance organization among prisoners. Pilecki's clandestine intelligence, received by the Allies in 1941, was among earliest. He escaped in 1943 after accomplishing...

On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women--many of them teenagers--were sent to Auschwitz. Their government...

"Henry Oster was just five years old when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. He was the last survivor of the more than two thousand Jews who were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported from Cologne. Assigned to back-breaking labor in the Auschwitz horse-breeding stables, Henry clung to the belief that if he made himself hard to replace, he might stay alive. Through it all, Henry found the strength to survive and was one of only twenty-three to emerge...

Recounts the author's experiences as a Jew in Nazi occupied Europe, her survival in a concentration camp, and post-war life in America speaking out as a Holocaust survivor. Growing up, Sara (Seren) Tuvel was the smartest, most ambitious girl in her Romanian mountain village. When she won and accepted a scholarship to a Gentiles-only Gymnasium, she was forced to make a decision that would change her path forever. At thirteen, faced with a teacher's...

Alex Ehren is poet, a prisoner, and a teacher in block 31 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as the Children's Block. He spends his days trying to survive and illegally giving lessons to his young charges, all while shielding them as best he can from the impossible horrors of the camp. But trying to teach the children is not the only illicit activity that Alex is involved in. Alex is keeping a diary.