Recounts the author's experiences as a young boy fleeing persecution in the late eighties Soviet Union, and his later return to Austria and Eastern Europe as an American adult to track down those who helped his family escape and thank them.

A historical novel based on real people and events: In 1940, Varian Fry -- a Harvard-educated American journalist -- traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad...

"Otto Ullman, a Jewish boy, was sent from Austria to Sweden right before the outbreak of World War II. There he became best friends with Ingvar Kamprad, who would grow up to become the founder of IKEA. Despite the huge Swedish resistance to Jews, the thirteen-year-old Otto was granted permission to enter Sweden--all in accordance with the Swedish archbishop's secret plan to save Jews on condition that they converted to Christianity. Otto found work...

"A highly original, tragicomic novel as seen through Sirius, an extraordinary dog who helps his Jewish family escape from Germany to California, becomes a Hollywood star, and, ultimately, contributes to Hitler's downfall"--

"Walter Wolff was the son of a Jewish merchant family that fled their German home when the Nazis came to power and took refuge in Brussels, Belgium. On the eve of the German invasion, in May 1940, the family began its second escape. Their sixteen-month odyssey took them through the chaos of battle in France and the dangers of living clandestinely as Jews in occupied territory, before they finally boarded the notorious freighter SS Navemar in Cadiz,...

Presents the story of a seventeen-year-old Jew whose assassination of a German diplomat in Paris was used by the Nazis as a pretext for the state-sponsored anti-Semitic pogrom known as Kristallnacht.

"November 9, 1938-Kristallnacht-the Nazis unleash a night of terror for Jews all across Germany. Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Army rampages through China and tightens its stranglehold on Shanghai, a city that becomes the last haven for thousands of desperate European Jews. Dr. Franz Adler, a renowned surgeon, is swept up in the wave of anti-Semitic violence and flees to Shanghai with his daughter. At a refugee hospital, Franz meets an enigmatic...

"The extraordinary true story of Polish-Jewish child refugees who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Iran. More than a million Jews escaped east from Nazi occupied Poland to Soviet occupied Poland. There they suffered extreme deprivation in Siberian gulags and "Special Settlements" and then, once "liberated," journeyed to the Soviet Central Asian Republics. The majority of Polish Jews who survived the Nazis outlived the war in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan;...