Bent Northrop Memorial Library

This remembrance of a vibrant New York neighborhood during World War II restores to life through a boy's eyes— a New York of baseball teams, prizefights, side bets, big bands blaring from the radios and worried soldiers' mothers— as absorbed from the safe precinct of his father's bakery in the Bronx where the boy spent his after-school hours and many warm summer days. Includes recipes for the bakery's bestselling bread and butter cookies.

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In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved, and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering...

"Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau. During six...