Books with title Youth Destroyed-the Nazi Camps: Primary Sources from the Holocaust

Alice Lok was deported to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp, in 1944. Upon her arrival, she faced a "selection." Alice had to stand in line as a Nazi doctor examined the new camp inmates. If the doctor pointed one direction, it meant hard labor—but labor meant life. If the doctor pointed the other way, that meant immediate death. Alice was lucky. She survived Auschwitz and two other camps. However, millions of Jews were not so lucky. There were six Nazi death camps in operation during World War II and thousands of other work and prison camps. Author Ann Byers details the stories of young people who were forced to live in Nazi camps during the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's rise to power in the 1930s changed life dramatically for all people living in Germany. Hitler used propaganda, fear, and brutality as his main weapons. Jewish children faced strong antiSemitism in their schools and on the street, and saw their families ripped apart. Non-Jewish children deemed "undesirable" suffered a similar fate. "Aryan" children were forced to enter Hitler Youth groups or endure humiliation. Told through the words of teenagers, author Linda Jacobs Altman uses primary sources to explore the destruction of childhood in Nazi Germany as the Holocaust took shape in Europe.

With her family starving, thirteen-year-old Charlene tried to smuggle eggs into a ghetto in Poland. A Nazi guard caught her and the eggs were smashed right in front of her. A few days later Charlene's friend was caught smuggling bread into the ghetto—she was murdered. Such was the fate for many Jewish youth living in the ghettos in Europe. They faced death, fear, hunger, hard labor, and disease everyday. Millions of Jews were forced into ghettos, where the Nazis kept them until they could be deported to the death camps. Through their own words, author Ann Byers explores the lives of young people living in the ghettos during the Holocaust.