Central Kansas Library System

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors. It's just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany, Markus...

"'Bloom where you're planted,' is the advice Christine Bölz receives from her beloved Oma. But seventeen-year-old domestic Christine knows there is a whole world waiting beyond her small German village. It's a world she's begun to glimpse through music, books--and through Isaac Bauerman, the cultured son of the wealthy Jewish family she works for. Yet the future she and Isaac dream of sharing faces greater challenges than their difference in stations....

In 1943, ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs, she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.

"For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times--the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University...

Berlin, 1934. Ilse Meyer is the aristocratic wife of a scientist whose post-WWI fortunes change for the better when Ilse's husband, Jurgen, is recruited for Hitler's new rocket program. Although Ilse and Jurgen do not share the popular political views rising in Germany, Jurgen's new job forces them to consider what they must sacrifice morally for their financial security. But too late they realize the Nazi's plans to weaponize Jurgen's technology...

During the third week of February 1944, the combined Allied air forces based in Britain and Italy launched their first round-the-clock bomber offensive against Germany. Their goal: to smash the main factories and production centers of the Luftwaffe while also drawing German planes into an aerial battle of attrition to neutralize the Luftwaffe as a fighting force prior to the cross-channel invasion, planned for a few months later. Officially called...

In 1940s Italy, teenager Pino Lella joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps and falls for a beautiful widow, he also becomes the personal driver of one of the Third Reich's most powerful commanders. Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs,...

A German teenager has an affair with an emotionally remote older woman and only years later, when he is a law student and she is on trial, does he discover that she was involved in the Holocaust. She refuses to defend herself when she is accused of a hideous crime. The young law student gradually realizes that the woman may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

The good-natured son of a baker wins the heart of a princess, with the help of a fairy and a magic goose.