Please Join Us!
Each month we will read a selected book and gather for a discussion. Book selections focus on Holocaust-related fiction, along with other genres on occasion. We look forward to hearing your comments about the books at our meetings and also your suggestions for new books to share.
HMTC will provide a copy of the monthly book selection to the first 15 participants to sign up. Books are only available for in-person pick up at the HMTC and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. The upcoming meetings and the selected books are included below.
For more information or to register, contact Linda Burghardt, HMTC's Scholar-in-Residence, at lindaburghardt@hmtcli.org, 516-571-8040.
UPCOMING SCHEDULE:
December 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, December 11, 2024 at 1:00 PM
It is 1938 in Vienna and Hitler’s brutal occupation of Austria forces Maria Altman and her new husband to flee. But the Nazis are after not only the family but their irreplaceable art collection, especially the dazzling painting of a young Jewish woman, Maria’s aunt Adele, painted by the infamous Gustave Klimt. In this novelization of a true story, Maria is forced to summon the courage that is her aunt’s legacy to keep her family history alive.
November 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Movie star. Assassin. Spy. She was all three. But above all, she was a Jew. From Warsaw to Hollywood, from the Holocaust to the Golden Age of Glamour, she used her star power to steal secrets and stockpile weapons to try to save her family and her forbidden love. And ultimately to exact revenge against the Nazis for everything that was stolen from her and the hundreds of thousands of Jewish souls that still haunt the Warsaw Ghetto.
October 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, October 16, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Promises shared between childhood friends are usually forgotten as the years pass, but for Lena Woodward, who started a new life in the US after the Holocaust, there are memories she can’t seem to shed. Her flight from Nazi-occupied Poland brought her safety but not peace, and now she must risk everything to find the courage to face the secrets from her harrowing past that she has worked so hard to outrun.
September 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, September 11, 2024 at 1:00 PM
During the Holocaust, while Jews were being systematically eliminated throughout Europe, babies were being born and nurtured through a secret Nazi breeding program designed to create more members of the so-called master race and build a Nazi-Aryan nation. While the women trapped in the terrifying Lebensborn project are forced to give birth and turn over their children to the Nazis, three of the mothers-to-be secretly join together to find a way out of oppression and keep their children out of Nazi hands. The discussion will be led by Dr. Linda Burghardt, Scholar-in-Residence at the HMTC.
August 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, August 14, 2024 at 1:00 PM
From a small Hungarian town to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, Andras Levi travels through a world about to be lost to the Nazis, as 1937 opens and a harrowing saga of war unfolds around a jewel-box romance. Profound love, familial bonds and deep personal loyalties will be tested as the young Jewish student faces the devastation of the Holocaust with nothing to shield him but the steadfastness of the human heart. Dr. Linda Burghardt, Scholar-in-Residence at the Center, will lead the discussion.
July 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, June 10, 2024 at 1:00 PM
In 1960s Manhattan, diners flock to Masha’s, a restaurant renowned both for its fine European food and the handsome owner with the tragic past. Peter is certain no one can take away his guilt at surviving the Nazi death camps when his wife and children perished there. But June’s gentle ways pierce Peter’s guard. Through the life they make together, he begins to believe he can forget, never suspecting that the buried shadows of the past will come to life once again, forcing him to face them down this time if he is to save his only daughter. The discussion will be led by Dr. Linda Burghardt, Scholar-in-Residence.
June 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, June 5, 2024 at 1:00 PM
As the storm clouds of World War II gather over Europe, Elise Landau realizes it is no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna, and she is forced to trade her life of champagne parties to become a parlor maid in England, where at least she will be protected from the growing Nazi threat. But between struggling to help her still endangered parents and adjusting to her position of servitude on an aristocratic estate, she must find a way to believe in the possibility of transcending social and class boundaries to survive the Holocaust and make a new life for herself.
Previous Books:
May 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Sofie and Mayim have been friends since childhood, but the virulent antisemitism of the Nazi regime threatens both their lives in different ways. Mayim must hide, but Sofie and her Christian family must pretend to support the Nazis to stay alive. Twenty years later, Sofie finds herself facing a dark, new prejudice in America when her husband is forced to join a secret intelligence program that employs former Nazis. And Mayim is missing; will Sofie be able to find her?
April 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, April 10, 2024 at 1:00 PM
In a small mountain village in Vichy France, a young Jewish woman who was forced to flee Paris finds a way to survive the Holocaust: forging identity documents for children being smuggled out to Switzerland by the Resistance. She secretly preserves their records in a hidden book, alongside the vital messages she encodes in it, but when the Nazis destroy the library, she fears it is lost forever. One day though, decades later, a newspaper appears on her desk with a story about a newly discovered book that looks very much like her own. Can she now help reunite those lost during the war?
March 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 1:00 PM
A Danish woman who survived the Holocaust and now lives peacefully in Chicago learns that a popular local restaurant owner is about to be honored as a war hero for helping Jews escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark. But the woman’s family was betrayed by a man she is sure is him. Hoping to reveal the truth, she paints “Traitor” and “Collaborator” and “War Criminal” on his property for all to see. Outraged, he sues her. But his lawsuit against her brings to light the plight of the Danish Jews under Nazi occupation and his not-so-innocent part in it, as it highlights the remarkable story of their rescue and survival.
February 2024 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Little Nico lives in the midst of the Holocaust in a tight-knit community in a small coastal city in Greece, where German officers apply Nazi principles with venomous zeal. Without realizing that the officers have used him to unwittingly betray his neighbors, the naïve 11-year-old suddenly finds his family in mortal danger. And though he finds a way to survive the devastation, he will spend the rest of his life seeking forgiveness, not only for himself but for the people he loves the most.
January 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, January 17, 2024 at
1:00 PM
When secrets from the past come down through the generations as hazy shadows that dim the natural light between mothers and daughters, the raw reality of an untold war can generate shame instead of love. All Trudy has of her silent mother’s story is a single photo of the two of them together with a Nazi officer. Will she be able to recreate the past and understand what her mother had to endure to survive the Holocaust?
December 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023 at 1:00pm
In the summer of 1941 in war-torn Poland, a young mother is forced to protect her five-year-old daughter by hiding with her in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Roza struggles to keep little Shira still and quiet, telling her a story about an enchanted garden in which the only sound is the song of a yellow bird. But their make-believe world is shattered when Roza must make an impossible choice: keep Shira with her or devise a way for her to survive on her own.
November 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023 at 1:00pm
As the head of an organization in Tel Aviv that seeks to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, Milia Gottstein has dedicated her life to making sure that the voices of Holocaust victims will never be silenced. But when she brings her work to Lithuania and tries to force the government to admit their historic responsibility for annihilating almost their entire Jewish population, including her own family, she is confronted with choices that threaten to betray all she has achieved.
October 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023 at 1:00pm
Living through World War II and the Holocaust with her young daughter, working in a Paris bookstore during the Nazi occupation, and fighting for her life at every turn, Charlotte is no victim -- she is a survivor. But it will take all her resilience to survive the next chapter of her life, as she tries to leave behind the City of Light to enter the publishing world in 1950s Manhattan, finding out along the way that survival never comes without a cost.
September 2023 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023 at 1:00pm
Berlin in 1938 was no place for a woman of science, especially a Jewish woman on the verge of discovering how to split the atom. But in 1945, having escaped to the U.S. and secured a job working with Robert Oppenheimer in his top-secret nuclear lab in Los Alamos, she is accused of leaking encoded equations to Hitler’s scientists. How will she defend herself, and how will her accuser, a man who arrived wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, discover the truth?
August 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, August 16, 2023 at 1:00pm
The Holocaust didn’t end when the camps were liberated, of course, and for three Jewish children sent into the arms of Christian strangers for safekeeping, the devastation of their stolen childhoods continues to rage within them even once the war was over. Now they are free to search for home and family, but will they ever be able to determine where and to whom they truly belong?
July 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 1:00pm
This new novel tells a compelling story and asks some provocative questions: Is it ever too late to confront the past and make peace with it? Is it possible to shine a light on some of the darkest aspects of human nature and come to terms with them? This is a powerful story about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz, a tale of guilt and complicity but also about finding solace after a lifelong struggle to embrace one’s humanity and learn how to hold fast to it.
June 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 1:00pm
Two boys, once as close as brothers, find themselves on opposite sides of the Holocaust, each struggling to survive in whatever way they can. Now, some 60 years later, a wealthy Chicago philanthropist is accused of being a former Nazi officer by a man who is sure he knows him. Is he right? Is this the poor abandoned child his family took in and raised as their own, the one who betrayed them all in the end?
May 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 at 1:00pm
Told from the perspective of a Christian German student, the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi officer, this book tells the story of a young woman caught in the Holocaust between two powerful forces: her dedication to the glorious promises of the Thousand Year Reich and her forbidden love for a Jewish man who awakens in her the possibility that everything she believes is based on dangerous lies that threaten to destroy them all.
April 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, April 19, 2023 at 1:00pm
Through a complicated system of spy channels, an American librarian in Lisbon works out a formula to make a clandestine connection with a French Resistance fighter in Lyon to help save Jewish lives from Nazi aggression. In those dark days of Europe in 1942, one small light shines on a smuggled printing press and the men and women who risk their lives to operate it, illuminating the power of words to achieve what guns and bombs cannot.
March 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at 1:00 pm
In a small, isolated house on the frozen icefields of Sweden lived an old man, all alone except for a secret. Afraid for his safety, his granddaughter comes to care for him, but the more she listens, tracing his story back to his childhood in Hamburg under the Nazis, the more she finds out he is not who she thinks he is, and that the dark shadow of the Holocaust that pursued him on a perilous escape to Denmark still touches them both.
February 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, February 15, 2023, at 1:00 pm
In pre-war Prague, the dreams of two young Jewish students are shattered when they are torn apart by the Nazi invasion. But decades later and thousands of miles away in New York City, an unexpected encounter brings them face to face with the deeply tangled relationship that had once promised them a fleeting chance at happiness. Now the war is long over, but the past is never past.
January 2023 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, January 18, 2023, at 1:00 pm
“Leopoldstadt,” by Tom Stoppard
Set in Vienna in the home of an affluent Jewish family, this stage play script tells the story of the coming catastrophe that would be called the Holocaust and its devastating effects on the family members. Currently playing on Broadway, “Leopoldstadt” is a memorial to a lost world, teeming with ideas, debate, humor and the sharp sense of betrayal among those who believed they were too safely assimilated into European society to be in danger when the Nazis arrived.
December 2022 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, December 14, 2022, at 1:00 pm
“The Song of the Jade Lily,” by Kirsty Manning
When the Bernfeld family’s comfortable life in Vienna is shattered by the Nazis on Kristallnacht, 13-year-old Romy and her parents flee to Shanghai, an open port and one of the few places that would accept Jews in 1938. There they struggle to rebuild their lives, sharing their sense of danger within the community of German-Jewish refugees as the war rages around them, all the while searching for safety and acceptance amid the local Chinese population and striving to create their new future in this strange land.
November 2022 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, November16, 2022, at 1:00 pm
“The Flight Portfolio” by Julie Orringer
Varian Fry, an affluent Protestant New Yorker, drawn to Europe’s art, music and literary heritage, finds nothing but barbarism in France in 1940. He heads to Marseille as a volunteer in a privately organized mission, the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose mandate, encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, is to facilitate escape for luminaries in the arts, virtually all of them Jews. His experiences there, told in fictional form, fairly bristle with peril, subterfuge, forgery and unrelenting hostility. But in the end he saves the lives of more than 2,000 desperate souls.
October 2022 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, October 12, 2022, at 1:00 pm
"The Girl from Berlin," by Ronald Balson
A gifted musician and daughter of the Jewish first violinist and concertmaster in the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic in the 1930s, Ada Baurgarten faces a future filled with promise, until the Nazis make her family a prime target and she is forced to use her extraordinary talent to try to save them. Decades later, in 2017, in Pienza, Italy, a property fight over an old stone villa and acres of lush vineyards and olive groves hinges on a secret hidden in the pages of a dusty leather-bound manuscript penned in Ada's handwriting, a manuscript exquisitely created to hide the secrets of her family's struggle for survival.
September 2022 Meeting (on Zoom) Wednesday, September 14, 2022, at 1:00 pm
“Those Who Are Saved” by Alexis Landau
As a Russian Jewish émigré to France, Vera cannot protect her four-year-old daughter Lucie once the Nazis occupy the country. Ordered to report to an internment camp, Vera has just a few hours to make an impossible choice: bring Lucie with her to the camp, or place her in hiding. No matter what her choice, she cannot know that Lucie will be on the other side of the war, a continent away, forcing her to search against all odds to find her lost daughter.
August 2022 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, August 17, 2022 at 1:00 pm
“The Living and the Lost” by Ellen Feldman
Working in bombed-out Berlin after the war is like living in a latter-day Wild West, where spies ply their trade, black markets thrive and forbidden fraternization is rampant. But Millie Mosbach and her brother, David, who escaped to the US just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister behind in Berlin, must make peace with their rage at Germany and their guilt for their own good fortune, if they are to confront the demons of their past and work successfully to rebuild the city.
July 2022 Meeting (on Zoom):
Wednesday, July 13, at 1:00 PM
“Maus I & II” by Art Spiegelman
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written in the graphic novel style, is a story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. Using hand-drawn pictures of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, the book powerfully depicts Spiegelman's heartfelt interviews with his aging father, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, and then tells the desperate story of his father's experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz.
June 2022 Meeting (on Zoom):
Wednesday, June 15, at 1:00 PM
“House on Endless Waters” by Emuna Elon
Shining a light on Amsterdam’s dark wartime history, this contemporary novel by the Israeli writer Emuna Elon follows one man’s startling discovery that his mother had a wartime baby he knows nothing about and that his own origins are not what he thought they were. This launches him on a fervent search for truth through the tangled path of the Holocaust in Holland, one in which he has to answer the question that has haunted him for a lifetime: Who am I?
May 2022 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, May 18, at 1:00 PM ET
“Mila 18” by Leon Uris
How the Jews of Warsaw lived and how they dealt with their imprisonment in the infamous ghetto, the destruction of their city, and ultimately their horrific mass murder is powerfully told in Mila 18, a story about love and tragedy, fear and transcendent courage. Multi-award-winning author Leon Uris brings us this novel about the ghetto uprising in April 1943 that defied Nazi tyranny and continues to endure as one of the iconic heroic struggles in modern history.
April 2022 Meeting (on Zoom):
Wednesday, April 13, at 1:00 PM ET
“The Prague Sonata” by Bradford Morrow
Music and war are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has composed his magnum opus, The Prague Sonata, a novel more than a dozen years in the making. The book tells the story of a young scholar’s search into the events of Nazi-occupied Prague to solve the mystery behind the missing pieces of a hauntingly beautiful, unsigned sonata manuscript.
March 2022 Meeting (on Zoom):
Wednesday, March 16, at 1:00 PM ET
“The Last Train to London” by Meg Waite Clayton
This novel is based on the true story of the Kindertransport, which rescued ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe. The novel tells the story of two teenagers, one Jewish and one Christian, who are living in Vienna in the 1930’s, following them as they face the Nazi invasion in 1938 and then are sent by their families to England for safety. At the same time, it explores the work of Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, who risked her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany.
February 2022 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, February 16, 2022 at 1:00 PM
“The Sunflower” by Simon Wiesenthal
A Holocaust survivor's surprising and thought-provoking study of forgiveness, justice, compassion, and human responsibility, featuring contributions from the Dalai Lama, Harry Wu, Cynthia Ozick, Primo Levi, and others.
January 2022 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, January 19,2022 at 1:00 PM
“Eli’s Promise” by Ronald Balson
Eli’s Promise tells the story of a Jewish man from Lublin whose wife disappears during the Nazi occupation and his desperate search -- through war-torn Poland, in displaced persons camps in Germany, and into modern-day Chicago -- for both her and the man who swore to keep her safe.
December 2021 Meeting (on Zoom)
Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2021 at 1:00 PM
“We Were the Lucky Ones” by Georgia Hunter
The book tells the story of a family of Polish Jews who are forcibly separated in the Holocaust, each one driven to navigate a different path toward safety with one goal in mind – to be reunited at the end of the war.
Book Club Blog Posts
This project is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. IMLS Grant Number ARPML-250757-OMLS-22.
