Category: Human Rights Issues


“Crossed”

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Literary Read Alike, Romance, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
January 11, 2012

Crossed by Ally Condie (second book in the Matched series)

“I think of all the things he can do—write, carve, paint—and suddenly, watching him stand in the dark at the edge of the empty settlement, something powerful washes over me. There is no place for someone like him in the Society, I think, for someone who can create. He can do so many things of incomparable value, things no one else can do, and the Society doesn’t care about that at all.”

Cassia has gotten her parents permission to seek Ky.They, after all, understand love. Her chance to make her way to the Outer Provinces, where she hopes to find Ky after he’s been arrested by the Society’s Officials, comes just as she is going to be transferred from a labor camp to her final work destination.

But Ky isn’t in the Outer Provinces. He’s being used as a decoy to draw fire from the Enemy, a position that the Society promises will only last six month. And then he will no longer be an Aberration but be admitted to normalcy and back into the Society. The thing is that no decoy has ever lasted six months. They are all killed under enemy fire. So Ky, too, needs to figure out how to escape and seek Cassia.

With both of our protagonists on the run, we readers enter a world far from the Society of the first book in this series (Matched, reviewed here). The center of this trilogy takes us through the Carvings and the Outer Provinces, full both with the stark beauty of nature and danger. Ally Condie, the author, said that she based the wilderness beyond the Society on her Southern Utah environment, and if you’ve ever been to any of Utah’s National Parks, you’ll perfectly picture the setting—caves, canyons, tight passages through sandstone.

A cast of new characters—Eli, Indie, Vick, Hunter—helps draw us into this primitive world. We still have the red, green, and blue pills of the Society’s calming, dying, forgetting, and surviving. But Ky and Cassie are both wondering about the larger questions that being on the run evokes: Is staying in the Society and having a chance at a second life worth it? If someone breaks free and takes her chances with death, will she also have the chance to play a part in the choices that affect her life? How finally, do we sort information and decide?

Crossed is best read after Matched. It’s a nice set up for the final showdown that we expect in the third book. I highly recommend this series to fans of The Hunger Games who are wondering what they can read now. As one student told me yesterday, she liked the dystopian future of The Hunger Games, but it’s one of her favorite books because of the romance. The same can be said of the Matched series. Cassia’s match, Xander, the third member of the love triangle, figures into Crossed.

Just a little side note: Crossed has a lot of good one-liners, quotable quotes. Here’s one that has me thinking about what will happen in the final book: “Because in the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.”

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“Start Something that Matters”

Filed under: Environmental Issues, Human Rights Issues, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
November 18, 2011

Start Something that Matters by Blake Mycoskie  

A perfect book for Thanksgiving.

“Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

–Thomas Edison

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

–Winston Churchill

Quotes like these dot the text of Start Something that Matters. Its author, Blake Mycoskie, is the founder (or as he calls himself, ‘chief shoe giver’) of TOMS. For every pair of shoes that TOMS sells, it gives one away to a needy person. It’s this ‘One for One’ business model that Mycoskie discusses in his book. But Start Something that Matters is about much more.

Mycoskie asks: What matters most to you? Should you focus on earning a living, pursuing your passions, or devoting yourself to the causes that inspire you? And then tells his reader that s/he doesn’t have to choose, but can do all of these things. He, of course, is a living example. And the reason I so like this book is that Mycoskie shows how important it is becoming to be a creative thinker, to be a storyteller. Because without a memorable story, no one cares about your company or your charity, or the project you are trying to get your schoolmates interested in. Stories resonate with people in a way that facts wouldn’t.

To start something that matters, you will need to move beyond story and face your fears, do the thing you didn’t think you could. You can’t wait until the time is right because it never is. You have to be frugal and imaginative. You have to allow a broad forum of ideas, give free speech to those working with you. You must have an environment of trust. With trust, even mistakes can lead to good outcomes.

Best of all, you should start early. Like now. In high school. Work on your dreams. Start that club, that service project, whatever. Check out Start Something that Matters for hints on getting it all going. Create the model by which you intend to live your life.

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“Unwind”

Filed under: "Banned Book", Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Literary Read Alike, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
October 25, 2011

Unwind by Neal Shusterman 

“The Second Civil War, also known as “The Heartland War,” was a long and bloody conflict fought over a single issue.

“To end the war, a set of constitutional amendments, known as “The Bill of Life” was passed.

“It satisfied both the Pro-life and the Pro-Choice armies.

“The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.

“However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child . . .

“. . .on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t ‘technically’ end.

“The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called ‘unwinding.’

“Unwinding is now a common and accepted practice in society.”

So opens the YA novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman. I read the first few pages aloud on Saturday at a banned and challenged book event because I figured no one else would have chosen this book to read as it’s fairly new. From the above opening prologue, you can guess that the book is controversial. But it’s a thoughtful piece on the value of the individual in a free society, and on what happens when people just can’t admit that they don’t have all the answers.

It’s also a great read.

Connor, who can’t control his anger, is sixteen and his parents have had it. He discovers that they secretly plan to unwind him, and he heads out on the run. Risa is a ward of the state, who, having failed at becoming a top-tier classical pianist, will be unwound because there just isn’t money for the state to keep useless teens. Lev is a ‘tithe’—because of his parents’ religious fervor, they will unwind him—their tenth child–as an offering to God.

All three are on the run. If they can make it to age eighteen, they might go to jail for awhile, but they are safe from being unwound.

The novel presents a sort of future ‘underground railroad,’ through which dedicated folks help unwinds escape to freedom. But generally speaking, teens who are about to be unwound have criminal records or anger issues—so hiding them in bunches can lead to an explosive situation. The actual unwinding process (at ‘harvest camp’) is bone chilling. (Note: If you are a sophomore on up, you can’t help but notice the nod to The Lord of the Flies—including a boy others call ‘the Mouth Breather’ because he has asthma. If you need to write a paper connecting LoTF with contemporary literature, this would be great fun.)

Action-packed, full of suspense, posing some deeper questions—this is another book for varied readers looking for very different things. I think just about everyone will like it. And that includes guys who usually don’t read. Check it out!

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“Into the Beautiful North”

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
October 24, 2011

Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea     

Tres Camarones, Sinaloa, Mexico just isn’t what it used to be. Looking for work, nearly all of the men have disappeared “into the beautiful north”—the United States. Nayeli, the young woman who has this revelation, decides to do something about it. After seeing her Aunt Irma’s favorite movie The Magnificent Seven (a classic Western, super popular in the 1960s), Nayeli decides to take her three best friends and cross the border. She is going to bring back seven Mexican men to help protect her little town from bandidos and drug smugglers. And she has secret motives as well. She wants to find her crush, a cute Southern California surfer who was also a Christian missionary in Sinaloa years before. Even more importantly, she wants to find her father, who disappeared into Illinois three years earlier.

Into the Beautiful North is by turns sad, frightening and comic. Nayeli (karate queen and soccer star), Yolo, Vampie (the only goth girl in town), and Tacho (openly gay, but feeling like a misfit) have a harrying journey through Mexico even before they try to cross the border. Their experiences on their journey—including their dealings with ‘coyotes,’ skin heads, drug smugglers, police, and Homeland Security, are realistic and frightening. Their experiences with kind strangers, some who live in a dump and yet still have the heart to help others, is also realistic.

All the characters are well drawn and quirky: Aunt Irma, the former bowling champion, women’s rights advocate and now Mayor of Tres Camarones; Atomiko, the dump ‘rat,’ who is also hero and protector to the group of friends; Tacho, gay in a closeted society but nevertheless enjoying life and becoming Nayeli’s hero.

The way that Urrea includes all points of view is unusual for a contemporary book, but it works very well. As the group takes a road trip—and later, when Nayeli and Tacho are crossing the United States on their own—the descriptions of the landscape and the atmosphere peculiar to each town are poetic. As the characters see the country for the first time, we readers see it anew through each individual’s eyes (and recognize the scents through their noses and the sensations through their fingertips). Though Nayeli’s ‘hero’s quest’ ends exactly as I knew it would (and from the writing, it seems the author thinks I’ll be surprised), I was wondering throughout the book how Nayeli herself would react to her disillusionment. Urrea did a great job with that.

This is a wonderful book for looking into the hope and desperation of people seeking a better life—and how a home town, with a little help from the good guys (and gals) can work to help all its residents. If your teacher asks you to take a modern novel and describe the hero’s journey, this would be a fun one to use because you’ll enjoy it so much for so many reasons.

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What will Hook You?

Filed under: "Banned Book", Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Mature Readers, Over 375 pages, Romance, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
August 30, 2011

After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr. 

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Uglies by Scott Westerfield

I was looking for a love story with some reality to it. I wanted to read a YA love story that didn’t end with the perfect couple, after a few fights, lasting forever in their fairy tale. So I checked some reviews and settled on After the Moment. Here are some of the reasons why:

“expertly-crafted story”

“The author’s feel for character and voice has never been better.”

“Leigh narrates with deep intelligence and heightened feeling.”

“The story focuses on the teens’ emotionally wrenching senior year, which begins in love before a possible date rape sets off escalating tragedy.”

Now I’ve been reading. And this got me to thinking. Because:

100 pages into the book, as the reader, I’ve met Maia, the girl half of this couple in love, long enough to see her eat a piece of cake and bring a suitcase full of sheets and books to a grieving girl. And here’s what I know:

It doesn’t matter that every professional reviewer raved about this book or that the first two pages of prologue are a real hook and that eventually I will get to the heart of the story (but God only knows when). I am never going to get a non-reader hooked on this book. The pace is way off. It has gone on so long about neighbors and their brothers, about what color the protagonist will paint his second bedroom and . . . If I recommend this book to any student who isn’t already a constant reader, I’m doomed. S/he won’t read the book past the first ten pages. And worse, that student will never trust my recommendation again.

That’s why I need to read all these books before I chat them up in the library.

Which got me to thinking some more.

What is one of the best books out there can make a non-reader read? One that has good writing, a great (even important) idea behind the story, but also has a rapid-fire plot line and lots of adventure? Yes, of course, The Hunger Games. But that trilogy is still wildly popular right now, so I don’t need to convince you to read it. Instead, let me move backward a few years because you might have been too young to read this trilogy when it came out: Uglies by Scott Westerfield.

Uglies is one of the best, fastest moving, constant action, suspense-filled YA books I’ve ever read. In the future world of Uglies, all people have an operation at age sixteen to make them ‘pretty’—that is, they all are changed to be perfect, or what is deemed perfect by society. Big-eyed and full-lipped, they appear childlike for the rest of their lives. And for some reason, their intellect remains rather childish, too. (Sinister plot elements ahead!)

While Tally is awaiting her operation so that she can leave Uglyville and join her best guy friend, Paris, over in Pretty Town, she meets a girl, Shay, who has the same birthday as Tally and therefore, should be made pretty on the same day. But Shay doesn’t want to be like everyone else, and her escape propels Tally in a direction she never would have thought possible. Tally has some exciting escapes even before she decides to fight the system, but once she does, danger is around every corner.

A bonus in this novel is that Tally’s method of transportation and escape is often bungee jumping—or even more often, hover boarding. Hover boarding is like skating, surfing or snowboarding. Tally has to be balanced as she quickly evades her pursuers. But she’s not on the water or the snow. She’s flying through the air, and a wrong move can mean death. If you skate, surf or snowboard, you’re going to be able to relate to Tally and Shay immediately.

So, I can recommend books like After the Moment to students I know well enough. We can talk about Leigh’s feeling about the Iraq War and how they relate to the more personal violence that becomes a part of his life; about how he is trying so hard to be a good guy, and how that doesn’t always work. But if you’re just trying to find that first book that will hook you into reading, I’m going for Uglies. And when you finish it, you can go on with Pretties, Specials, and Extras. And then you can move onto other series by the same author. And then books by other authors with similar themes. And then books about other things.

Get hooked.

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“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”

Filed under: Biography/Memoir, Controversial Issue/Debate, Faith-Based/Religious Element, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — 2 Comments
August 29, 2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot    

Teachers who are thinking outside the box will let you read this for your biography/memoir assignment, and what a great opportunity!

The story of Henrietta Lacks is more than a biography of an individual woman, It’s the story of the first person’s cells that scientists could cause to grow in a lab—that could live outside the body and be shipped around the world, thus making new research possible. It’s the story of a family that knew nothing of the cells or the fact that they had been removed from the cancer-stricken and dying Henrietta. It’s about the effect that this medical miracle had on Henrietta’s children. It’s about medical treatment for African-Americans in the 1950s South.

Henrietta Lacks grew up in poverty in Clover,Virginiain the segregated, pre-civil-rights-era South. Her family were tobacco farmers, and the house she was raised in was once slave quarters. (The author discovers a white branch of the Lacks family, but they refuse to acknowledge their biological connection to Henrietta.) Amazingly, before Henrietta died on October 4, 1951, cells taken atJohnsHopkinsHospitalduring a gynecological exam for her cervical cancer had become the first cells to be cultured in a lab and survive. The cells, known as HeLa, were so strong, that they could be shipped to medical labs everywhere. These cells become the necessary component for medical advances such as the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, understanding the effects of nuclear bombs, and part of the search for a cure for AIDS.

Knowing this, you’d think that Henrietta’s children would have become wealthy. Ironically, they spent years without medical insurance, and for twenty years, didn’t even know that their mother’s cells existed. They couldn’t afford the benefits of the research done with their mother’s cells. In fact, they suffered from secrets as well as con men. Especially hard hit was Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who, without the educational background necessary to understand how the cells survived, became prey to every report that her mother had been cloned or that her cells had been fused with those of other life forms.

Part of this biography of Henrietta and her cells is about the sad way that African-Americans were treated in medical experiments. (In this sense, Henrietta’s daughter Elise, who was sent to a state hospital and diagnosed with “Idiocy”—and then experimented on in a horrific manner—is just as interesting as Henrietta’s story.) But part of this book details the fascinating fact that no one has any rights over their cells, their discarded tissues. Even if this tissue becomes valuable, as Henrietta’s did, and makes millions of dollars for the companies and individuals that market it, it is considered a waste product, trash that the individual has discarded. (And most of the time tissue/cells aren’t worth anything—people have moles, appendixes, and gallbladders removed all the time.) So the horrible way that the Lacks family was treated also figured into the rise of bioethics—of getting informed consent from patients before using their tissue for medical experiments.

This great book embraces so many themes. Deborah’s life with its grounding in both superstition and spirituality is just as important to the reader as is Henrietta’s. The author has the ability to show us so many things about life, science, treatment of Africa-Americans, medical research—and we can understand it all because she is so good at making it clear. The only part of the story that she doesn’t dig into is the life of Henrietta’s husband, David Lacks. I wondered a lot about him as Henrietta’s cancer was caused by repeated STDs that he gave her. After she died at age 31, he allowed a new woman in his life whose cruel abuse of the children permanently scarred them—destroying the life of at least one of the five kids. Yet David is given a pass on everything. Perhaps the author didn’t feel that his story was crucial to the arc of the overall family story, but it was the one missing piece that bothered me. Still, this is one of the best books of its kind. Any student interested in medicine, the history of the treatment of African-Americans by researchers, the rise of bioethics—or just a good story of a suffering family—will want to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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“Trash”

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Fiction, Horror/Mystery/Suspense, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
July 8, 2011

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    Trash by Andy Mulligan

Trash takes place in an unnamed third-world country in South America. (The main characters want to go to Sao Paulo, Brazil, so they must be somewhere close enough to have heard of the city.) Raphael, Gardo, and Rat—three “dumpsite” boys—keep off starvation by digging through trash, recycling items and hoping to find money or items of value. Since there is no sanitation in the poorer districts of the city, what they often find is human excrement. It’s hard to imagine a more miserable life than theirs, surrounded by filth, hunger and disease.

One day the impossible happens. Raphael finds a leather bag with several items including a map, a wallet with some money, a driver’s license, some pictures, and a key. Since he always works with Gardo, he splits the money with him. But when the police come looking for the leather bag, Raphael senses it is very important and doesn’t reveal his secret. He gets Rat, the most destitute of all the children, to hide it.

Rat is able to identify the type of key Raphael has found; it belongs to a locker in the train station where Rat used to beg. Once the boys find and open the locker, they know they are in serious trouble. They’re onto a scandal, and the corruption goes way past the local police, all the way to figures in the national government. People are dying in this cover-up, and the boys need to decide whether to collect a reward or seek justice for the poor.

This is a good mystery for everyone. Most of the story is told, in alternating chapters, by the three boys, although adults, such as the priest who runs the local school for the dumpsite children, give the reader some important background information. Join them on their adventure in fighting governmental corruption in a country where political dishonesty is the norm.

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“Matched” (on Ms. W’s summer reading list)

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Literary Read Alike, Romance, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
June 8, 2011

Matched by Ally Condie  

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams

Yes, Matched is another future dystopia, but like Hunger Games, this one is a great read. And yet the story itself isn’t similar to Hunger Games. So—enjoy it on its own terms.

Matched takes its title from the important milestone in teens’ lives—at age seventeen—when they are formally matched to their life’s partner. This person is someone they don’t know, living in another area of the country, perhaps. Yet matches succeed because the society has all the data necessary to pick the two people who are most perfect for one another. The two will get to know one another over the next four years, and, at twenty-one, will be united. They will have until they are thirty-one to produce children (maximum two); after that, childbearing isn’t allowed because, statistically, it can produce kids that aren’t perfect. Some members of society are ‘singles’ and don’t receive matches.

Oddly, when Cassia goes to her matching banquet (the only time she is allowed to wear something beautiful and colorful), she is matched with her best friend, Xander. Everyone is envious because she already knows and loves this boy. But later, when she goes home and places his data card into her reader, he disappears momentarily and a different match shows on the screen, another boy she knows—Ky, who is from the outer regions, whose parents are dead, and who was adopted by his aunt and uncle.

Right after Cassia’s ‘match banquet,’ her grandfather has his 80th birthday banquet, which is really the last celebration before death, as the society requires everyone to die on the 80th birthday (data shows it’s the best time to die). On this night, Grandfather lets Cassia know of poems he had hidden, poems not belonging to the 100 preserved by the Society—and therefore illegal to have. One of the poems is Dylan Thomas’s “Go Not Gentle into that Good Night,” and Cassia realizes this isn’t just about death but also about not obeying (gently) the Society when it doesn’t allow individuality.

Cassia says that she, like others, has always believed, “Following the rules. Staying safe. These are the things that matter.” But once she finds Ky in the data port, everything is open to question. She realizes that her father breaks simple rules and laws out of love for the family—and that her mother follows all the rules for the same reason. Cassia needs to find out if ‘falling in love with someone’s story is the same thing as falling in love with the person.’ She needs to know if danger and uncertainty are worth the opportunity to make choices about life and love.

YA dystopian novels are taking a hit right now. The Wall Street Journal (a conservative business newspaper) just published an opinion piece about this. (If you’d like to read it, click here.) This surprises me as the new YA novels are very much like George Orwell’s books (Animal Farm and 1984), which is generally loved by conservatives. I think a discussion of this social issue would be a great topic for a research paper or a literary analysis paper. Another great topic would be to compare Matched to the literary and art works it discusses (and which are outlawed by its Society), particularly the Dylan Thomas poem. By the way—the quote from the poet William Carlos Williams isn’t in the novel, but it was so much of what the book is about, I had to mention it.

If you’re just looking for a good read and nothing more, this is still your novel. The characters are complex and no one is a ‘bad guy’ in the love triangle that evolves. As a bonus, its star-crossed lovers, just like Romeo and Juliet, are bound for trouble.

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“Between Shades of Gray” (on Ms. W’s summer reading list)

Filed under: Fiction, Historical Fiction/Historical Element, Human Rights Issues, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
June 4, 2011

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys   

As teens, we don’t hear much about Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1940s. The terrible things that he was responsible for are often placed in the shadow of the Holocaust. Yet Stalin was responsible for the death of 20 million civilians, and his reasons for deporting them from eastern European countries to work camps and prisons in Russia made no more sense than the Holocaust. As students are working on their senior projects, they often ask me for a work of fiction that discusses something monumental like the Holocaust. But they know that all of their classmates are selecting novels about the Holocaust, and they want to work on something different.

If you are one of those students, here’s your book. And if you are interested in the great tragedies of history, this is your book. But of you just want to read a well-told story about a teenage girl living through the most difficult circumstances imaginable and yet maintaining her will to live, then—this is your book.

Lina is a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian in 1941. Her father has been removed, apparently to a Russian prison camp. She, along with her mother, Elena, and her brother, Jonas, is taken to a labor camp in Siberia. On the way, the cattle-car train stops in front of a hospital and the prisoners believe that those who are wounded or infirm will be helped. Instead, a woman who has just had a baby minutes earlier is thrown on the car with the newborn. You can guess the outcome of that, but reading of the baby’s death and then of the mother’s fate is no less tragic for it’s predictability.

The journey to Siberia will remind you of narratives of the Holocaust or movies like Schindler’s List. The circumstances in the cattle cars—crowding, darkness, hunger, no toilets, people dying and being thrown off when the train cars stop at stations—are absolutely horrific. Lina’s mother, Elena, is wise to have sewn valuables into her coat because she’ll need them to barter for the lives of her children.

And life in the labor camps in Siberia is a continuation of the horror. The Lithuanian prisoners’ only crime is that that are considered enemies of the Soviet state—that is they are well-educated thinkers or the innocent children of those thinkers. (In Lina’s group, we have a teacher and a librarian. Her own father is a college professor). Lina’s thoughts move back to her ordinary life: the local librarian and story hours, Christmases past, her teacher discovering her promise as an artist, and her hope of attending an art program in the Lithuanian capital. These past events punctuate her current reality.

Lina is a fighter. And the way she can fight through starvation, through the freezing cold of living in the Arctic Circle, and through the backbreaking labor of digging for beets and potatoes is to record the truth in her art. She takes a great risk in drawing the members of the NKVD (Secret Police), the prisoners, and the circumstances of their existence. She creates a record of the truth, to be found by a future generation.

One of the characters makes an interesting observation when he says that Hitler and Stalin are competing to be the ruler of hell. You know that there are people for whom power is everything. But you also question: Why create hell to rule over?

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“My Brother’s Voice”

Filed under: Biography/Memoir, Historical Fiction/Historical Element, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural, Non-fiction, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 2 Comments
January 26, 2011

My Brother’s Voice

by Stephen Nasser, Holocaust survivor

In 1944, the Nazis took 13-year-old Nasser and 21 members of his family to the Auschwitz and Muhldorf Concentration Camps. Pista, as he was known, was the only member of his family to survive. (He witnessed the horrific murder of his aunt and baby cousin.) His remembrance of his brother, Andris, telling him to live helps him through his ordeal. His memoir My Brother’s Voice is a moving account of his experience. From page one, we read of horrific treatment, first by average Germans, including schoolmates, and later by Nazi soldiers. Something that I’ve never read in a book by Holocaust survivor is about the difference between common German soldiers—who are trying to give the victims a chance to survive—and the sadistic SS soldiers who are working hard to insure their deaths. Chapters about the struggle for survival are intertwined with chapters about Nasser’s life and family before the death camps.

Pista had a small Boy Scout knife, and he used it to carve little figures which he then traded for food and pencils with the German Wermacht. He used cement bags as paper and bound pieces together with wire. Thus he had a diary. Though this diary was lost when Pista, unconscious and seemingly dead, was pulled from a pile of bodies in a boxcar, he rewrote his memories, and from these, he tells his story in this book.

Nasser will be speaking to history classes here at COHS on Tuesday, Feb. 22. If you would like to buy his book and have him sign it, you may. He will have copies (hard cover $21, soft cover $15) to sell. (If you pay by check, make it out to Stephen Nasser.) The book is also available on Amazon. Ms. Waddle has also purchased several copies for our library which can be checked out by anyone with an Ontario City Library card, including students.

For more information on the Holocaust, check The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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