One School, One Book at Bigelow
Bigelow Reads Together!
The goal of Bigelow's One School, One Book Program is to create a more inclusive community through participation in a common reading experience as a whole school. Through discussion and advisory activities, staff and students will share a common experience of reading and learning together.
This, the only memoir published by a former Schindler's list child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable. Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance, and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow. Ultimately, it was the generosity and cunning of one man, Oskar Schindler, who saved Leon Leyson's life, and the lives of his mother, his father, and two of his four siblings, by adding their names to his list of workers in his factory--a list that became world renowned: Schindler's list.
At the Sèvres Children's Home outside Paris, Rachel Cohen has discovered her passion--photography. Although she hasn't heard from her parents in months, she loves the people at her school and capturing what she sees there.a She tries not to worry too much about Hitler's war. But as France buckles under the Nazi regime, danger closes in, and Rachel must change her name and go into hiding. As Catherine Colin, Rachel Cohen has to leave her school. But with her beautiful camera, Catherine possesses an object with the power to remember. For the rest of the war, Catherine bears witness to her own journey, and to the countless heroes whose courage and generosity saved the lives of many, including her own. Based on the author's mother's own experiences as a hidden child in France during World War II,
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift- to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's great-grandma Anna--passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York. Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.
Desperate to save them from the Nazis, Henry and Helen's mother makes the harrowing decision to take her children from their home in 1940s Germany and leave them in the care of strangers in France. The brother and sister must hide their Jewish identity to pass for orphans being fostered at a convent in the foreign land. Visits from a local mime become the children's one source of joy, especially for Henry, whose traumatic experience has left him a selective mute. When an informer gives them up, the children are forced to flee yet again from the Nazis, but this time the local mime--a not yet famous Marcel Marceau--risks everything to try to save the children.
Chaya Lindner is a teenager living in Nazi-occupied Poland who becomes a courier between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people. Soon Chaya joins a resistance cell that runs raids on the Nazis' supplies. But after a mission goes terribly wrong, Chaya's network shatters, and she finds herself on a journey toward an even larger uprisingin the Warsaw Ghetto.
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people in the distance. But Bruno longs to be an explorer and explores his new environment. He meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different from his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.
Read or Listen to White Bird using SORA
