Under The Iron Bridge

It’s 1938 in Dusseldorf, Germany, and Paul is feeling pressured to join the Hitler Youth. The last thing he wants to do is march around with a bunch of bullies, supporting the Gestapo and abusing the city’s Jews, but even Paul’s parents think he should go along with his classmates in order to keep himself safe. Just when he’s starting to despair, Paul meets the Edelweiss Pirates, a group of teenage boys and girls who are working to undermine the growing power of the Nazis. When he joins the rebel organization, he finds out just how hair-raising and dangerous it is to sabotage the Third Reich and rescue Jews wherever they can. But choices have consequences, and during the terrifying violence of Kristallnacht, Paul must step out of the shadows and make a life-changing decision. Inspired by the true story of the Edelweiss Pirates, a group that declared “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth,” Under the Iron Bridge is a tale of courage in the face of cruelty.

Shanghai, China is a strange place for a young Jewish girl from ViennaÉ But that is where Lily Toufar finds herself in 1938. She and her family have left their home to find safety far away from Europe, where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party are making life unbearable for Jews. TheyÕve had to travel fast Ð Lily even had to leave behind most of her toys and books Ð but here she feels free from danger. Despite their hopes, it quickly turns out that all is not safe in Shanghai. Now that the area is controlled by Japan, whose leaders support Hitler, the local government orders Jewish refugees, including Lily and her family, to move into a ghetto in an area of the city called Hongkew. Once again Lily wonders what will happen next. Life changes for Lily and her family when they are forced to the over-crowded ghetto. There is little food to eat, and many people become sick. Lily remains hopeful, but when rumors begin to circulate that Jews may be in as much danger here as they were in Europe, she wonders if she will ever feel truly safe and at home again. Based on a true story.

Gabi is a young Jewish girl living in Czechoslovakia during the time of the Holocaust. Gradually life is getting harder and harder. Jews are bullied at school, they can't visit each other at a certain time, they have to walk everywhere, they are not allowed to go to non-Jewish stores, and finally Gabi's best friend deserts her because she is Jewish. One day, the Nazis start visiting all the houses looking for Jewish children. In a tremendous act of courage, Gabi's mother protects Gabi from the soldiers by hiding her in their dining-room dresser. This is the story of author Kathy Kacer's own mother, who was the real-life Gabi. The only thing retrieved from their family's home after the war was the dresser that saved Gabi's life. It now sits in author Kathy Kacer's home in Toronto.

“You lose your loved ones, and still you want to live.” On 21 July 1942, the Nazis reached the small Polish town of Zolkiew. Life for fifteen-year-old Clara Kramer would never be the same. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, three families found perilous refuge in a hand-dug cellar. Hers was one of them. Living above and protecting them were the Becks. Mrs. Beck had been the families’ maid. Mr. Beck was alcoholic and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life to keep his charges safe. But survival under his protection proved to be anything but predictable. Whether it was his nightly drinking sessions with officers of the SS in the room just above or his torrid affair with one of the hiding women, it seemed that Clara and the others often had as much to fear from Beck as they did from the war. Clara’s mother told her to keep a diary while they lived in the bunker in order to fill her time and “so the world would know what happened to us.” Over sixty years later, Clara Kramer has finally turned those diaries into a compelling and heartbreaking memoir — a story of love and memory and survival.

The remarkable true story of a young girl named Edith and the French village of Moissac that helped her and many other children during the Holocaust. The town's mayor and citizens concealed the presence of hundreds of Jewish children who lived in a safe house, risking their own safety by hiding the children from the Nazis in plain site, saving them from being captured and detained and most certainly saving their lives.

Based on the true story of a Jewish family's fight to regain a symbol of their lost life, Restitution begins in Prague on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The Reesers know that they must flee Czechoslovakia, but first they deliver their valuable oil paintings into the hands of a Christian colleague for safekeeping. Led by their intrepid matriarch, Mari Reeser, the family make their escape under the nose of the Nazis, arriving in Canada just days before WWII begins. Despite a successful new life in Toronto, the Reesers never forgot what was left behind. When peace returned to Europe, Mari fought for the return of the paintings, only to be thwarted by the Communist regime. Hope sparked again in 1989 when Mari's son, Karl Reeser, received a letter saying the paintings were his if he could retrieve them. Finding all legal means closed to him, he traveled to Prague to make one last try. Here, fate intervened with an unlikely savior named Richard VandenBosch, an official at the Canadian Embassy. Together, he and Karl manage to retrieve the paintings and secrete them in the embassy. The final hurdle -- how to get the paintings to Canada? -- is solved by a resourceful art dealer and smuggler named Theofil Kral, whose honest desire to help the Reeser family restore a symbol of their vanished life sees the four paintings returned to them at last.

Irene grew up traveling around Germany with her family’s circus, surrounded by her loved ones and thrilling the crowds with her performance on the high wire...until one day, the audience boos. The Lorch family is Jewish, and the increasing power of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis has put them all in grave danger. When the circus is forced to shut down and Irene’s father is taken away, Irene and her mother must go into hiding with another circus. Every day is a frightening new kind of balancing act, caught between the desire to perform and the need to hide—even in plain sight.

The Iron Bridge that spans the River Severn at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire is the most enduring symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Built in 1779, the bridge changed forever the lives of the local people, settlement patterns, communication and the economy of the area.