Anthony Drago Libri

On August 6, 1945, 22-year-old Kaleria Palchikoff was doing pre-breakfast chores when a blinding flash lit the sky over Hiroshima, Japan. A moment later, everything went black as the house collapsed on her and her family. Their world, and everyone else's, changed as the first atomic bomb was detonated over a city. From Russian nobility, the Palchikoff's barely escaped death at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries until her father, a White Russian officer, hijacked a ship to take them to safety in Hiroshima. Safety was short lived. Her father, a talented musician, established a new life for the family, but the outbreak of World War II created a cloud of suspicion that led to his imprisonment and years of deprivation for his family. After the bombing, trapped in the center of previously unimagined devastation, Kaleria summoned her strength to come to the aid of bomb victims, treating the never-before seen effects of radiation. Fluent in English, Kaleria was soon recruited to work with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's occupation forces in a number of secretarial positions until the family found a new life in the United States. Heavily based on quotes from Kaleria's memoirs written immediately after World War II, and transcripts of United States Army Air Force interviews with her.

The true story of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl is torn from her home and family and thrust into one of history's greatest atrocities, the concentration camp of Auschwitz. In January of 1943, fourteen-year-old Basha Anush and her family were dragged from their home in Pruzhany, Poland by Nazi troops and shipped off to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Within days, five members of her family would be dead and she would be subjected to two-and-a-half years of abuse, a death march into Germany, and months of roaming with other homeless girls when the Third Reich collapsed. Despite it all, she honored a last-minute promise given to her mother: she would survive to tell the story.