AustLit

'Michael Leibowitz has had an ongoing love affair with the written word. During the pandemic, poetry visited Michael resulting in his collection of verse, Looking In: Selected poems.' (Publication summary)

'Tika’s Amazing Journey journey begins on a train carrying her from fear to freedom. She remembers her life before boarding this train and describes her life as a young Jewish child during and after World war II. The story shows a child’s perspective of what it was like under both Nazi and Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. After their successful escape, Tika and her mother live through many adventures. They travel through strange lands and face many challenges. Tika is a brave, clever, mischievous child, who has to learn whom to trust and whom to fear. Most importantly, she has to learn how to survive in her ever-changing, curious, complex, world.' (Publication summary)

'This memoir by Therese C. Masson is one of the rare, first-hand accounts of a child’s life in the Warsaw Ghetto and in hiding on the Aryan side. In this short, beautifully written account, the author weaves together memories from her wartime childhood, reflections on the psychological burdens and damages she carried into her adult life, and accounts of her travels in the last decade of her life to contemporary Warsaw seeking to find traces of the past.

'In these pages, the reader will encounter events as they were experienced by a child as well as insights and confessions of an adult—written vividly, honestly and with striking psychological insight. This unique tapestry of time and perspective makes this book stand out in the vast and growing literature about the Holocaust.' (Publication summary)

'When bombs rain down on the Malayan plantation where seven-year-old Rosie lives with her parents and beloved amah, her days of privilege and playfulness come to an abrupt end. Swept along with other British families eager to escape Malaya, fate cruelly leaves Rosie on the deck of a ship heading to India, alone and separated from her family Confined to a brutal school in Bombay, a determined Rosie seeks freedom in the crowded, chaotic city slums. Her life is lightened when she meets Armand, a poor Portuguese-Indian boy, and his mother. They shield Rosie with their love and allow her to enjoy adventures and escapades on the magical streets of Bombay. While Rosie is growing up on her own terms, her parents and brother endure different worlds in prison camps, dreaming of one day being reunited in Scotland.'  (Publication summary)

'Nora Huppert has had a lucky life. Flown out of Prague on the first Kindertransport, she barely escaped the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939. Her father from Berlin, a radical journalist, had fled even earlier, promising to arrange for Nora, her mother and brother to follow him to London. Nora was taken in by a large and loving English family, the McNairs, and spent the War years on a farm in the English countryside. Her vivid account of those years, of working in post-War London, meeting her Austrian doctor husband, Peter, living with him all over the country as he worked his way up the medical hierarchy, then migrating to Tasmania, as far as possible from Cold War Europe, is an enthralling story.

The cities of Europe between the Wars, Britain during the Blitz, post-War London and Switzerland, and Australia as experienced by a middle class migrant family are all vividly evoked in the book. Nora’s father’s and husband’s internment as ‘enemy aliens’ and their subsequent release into useful Allied War work; the tightening of the Nazi net around those like her mother and brother, marooned in Prague; the dispersal to camps and exile of family and friends from the great European cities; the rise and fall of Communism: Nora and her family have experienced the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century.' (Publisher's description)

"Singapore, 1942, is an exotic tropical city and the home of six-year-old Rosie Sharbanee. Born into a lively Iraqi-Jewish family who rose from humble beginnings to create a thriving business, Rosie's days are filled with the love of her amusing and exasperating relatives and servants. Forced to flee or submit to the Japanese occupation, Rosie's family splits apart. Rosie's War reveals their hazardous escape to Bombay, from the perspective of watchful, sensitive Rosie. With honesty and affection, Rosalind recalls her fascinating childhood in a family of multilingual British subjects, and illuminates their wartime struggles."

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is the story of how a great European crime, the murderous ethnic program of the German Reich, cancelled out the sweet Polish childhood and adolescence of the child Halina Trachtenberg. Above all, the book fills out our knowledge of the huge injustice done to families like hers. It is wonderful she was able to put it down in a satisfying record.' (Publication summary)