Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.

Auschwitz Lullaby brings to life the story of Helene Hannemann-a woman who sacrificed everything for family and fought furiously for the children she hoped to save. On an otherwise ordinary morning in 1943, Helene Hannemann is preparing her five children for the day when the German police arrive at her home. Helenes worst fears come true when the police, under strict orders from the SS, demand that her children and husband, all of Romani heritage,...

Cilka is just sixteen years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping with the enemy and sent to a Siberian...

"1944. Physics professor Alfred Mendl is separated from his family and sent to the men's camp, where all of his belongings are tossed on a roaring fire. His books, his papers, his life's work. The Nazis have no idea what they have just destroyed. And without that physical record, Alfred is one of only two people in the world with his particular knowledge. Knowledge that could start a war, or end it. Nathan Blum works behind a desk at an intelligence...

"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a caf� by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German citizen. And he is black. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now...

"We first met Naomi in Obasan, a deeply moving novel in which Joy Kogawa explored the Japanese Canadian wartime experience through the girl's very young eyes. Canada's betrayal of Japanese Canadian citizens during the 1940s fractured that community, and it never fully healed. The child Naomi, too was terribly wounded. Itsuka tells another story, one of profound hope, extrodinary commitment, and the fragile progress of love." From the bookjacket

"A man ahead of his time, Japanese college professor Masao Takashimaya of Kyoto had a passion for modern ideas that was as strong as his wife's belief in ancient traditions. It was the early 1920s and Masao had dreams for the future - and a fascination with the politics and opportunities of a world that was changing every day. Twenty years later, his eighteen-year-old daughter Hiroko, torn between her mother's traditions and her father's wishes, boarded...

When Anna Kramer, a Los Alamos, New Mexico, piano teacher, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a womam she does not know. Hana's music, however, soon begins to uncover forgotten emotions, and the dead woman's journals, which begin in 1945 after she is released from a concentration camp, slowly reveal decades-old secrets that Anna and her family have kept buried even from themselves.

Amid the brutality of Auschwitz during the Holocaust, a forbidden gift helps two teenage girls find hope, friendship, and the will to live in this novel in verse that's based on a true story.