RAG Demo

Tag: World war ii

  • The Book Thief

    In 1939, nine-year-old Liesel Meminger is taken to live with foster parents on Himmel Street in Molching, a small town near Munich. On the way, at her brother's graveside, she picks up her first stolen book, a gravedigger's handbook she cannot yet read. Her accordion-playing foster father, Hans Hubermann, teaches her letters in the basement late at night, while his sharp-tongued wife Rosa hides real tenderness.

    Liesel befriends Rudy Steiner, a lemon-haired neighbour who idolises Jesse Owens, and begins rescuing books from Nazi bonfires and the library of the mayor's wife. The Hubermanns then take a dangerous step by hiding Max Vandenburg, a young Jewish man, in their basement. Words become Liesel's way of understanding and resisting the world around her.

    The narrator is Death, weary, wry and oddly compassionate, who announces some events in advance and comments on human nature. Zusak, an Australian whose parents grew up in Germany and Austria, drew on their stories. Published for adults in Australia and as young adult fiction elsewhere, the book became an international bestseller and a 2013 film.

    Book details

    AuthorMarkus Zusak
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)552
    SettingMolching, a fictional town near Munich, Germany, 1939-1943
    AwardsMichael L. Printz Honor 2007

    Themes

    • The power of words
    • Death
    • Courage
    • Friendship
    • Life under Nazism

    Who should read it

    Teenagers and adults who want a moving Second World War story about books, family and kindness.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Diary of a Young Girl
    • All the Light We Cannot See
    • The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

  • The Diary of a Young Girl

    Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, weeks before her family went into hiding to escape the persecution of Jews in German-occupied Amsterdam. For more than two years, eight people lived in concealed rooms behind her father Otto's business premises, helped by a small group of employees who brought food and news.

    Writing her entries as letters to an imaginary friend she called Kitty, Anne describes cramped quarters, quarrels with her mother and with the dentist who shared her room, the fear of discovery at every noise, and the war heard through the radio. She also writes about growing up: her changing body, her friendship with Peter van Pels, her religious and moral questions, and her ambition to become a writer. In 1944 she began revising the diary herself after hearing a radio appeal to preserve wartime records.

    Her father, the only one of the eight to survive the camps, published the diary in Dutch in 1947. Translated into some seventy languages, it is among the most widely read books in the world and a central text for teaching about the Holocaust.

    Book details

    AuthorAnne Frank
    First published1947
    Original languageDutch
    Translated byB. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday
    GenreMemoir
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)283
    SettingThe Secret Annex, Amsterdam, 1942-1944

    Themes

    • Holocaust
    • Adolescence
    • Confinement
    • Hope
    • Identity

    Who should read it

    Students and adults alike who want to understand the Holocaust through the voice of one vivid, thoughtful teenager.

    If you liked this, try

    • Man's Search for Meaning
    • Night
    • The Book Thief