Although separated by continents and decades, Josef, a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany; Isabel, a Cuban girl trying to escape the riots and unrest plaguing her country in 1994; and Mahmoud, a Syrian boy in 2015 whose homeland is torn apart by violence and destruction, embark on harrowing journeys in search of refuge, discovering shocking connections that tie their stories together.

"Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish families like Ruth's experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November 1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and forced arrests. Days later, desperate volunteers sprang into action to organize...

"The Shelter and the Fence is a well-written, well-researched story of Holocaust rescues. . . . makes it clear that despite the saving of almost 1,000 refugees the United States did much too little to save victims of Nazi terror." -David A. Adler, author of The Number on My Grandfather's Arm The story of Holocaust refugees who found shelter in the United States--with unique parallels to today's stories of asylum seekers. In 1944, at the height...

In 1938, Edith Westerfeld, a young German Jew, is sent by her parents to Chicago, Illinois, where she lives with an aunt and uncle and tries to assimilate into American culture, while worrying about her parents and mourning the loss of everything she has ever known. Based on the author's mother's experience, includes an afterword about a little-known program that brought twelve hundred Jewish children to safety during World War II.

Lonek's Journey tells the gripping story of an 11-year-old Jewish boy's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939, and his subsequent deportation to a Siberian gulag. When a twist of fate frees him from the Russian slave labor camp, he begins a two-year odyssey over thousands of miles by land and sea, to find freedom in what was then Palestine. This little-known story of the rescue of almost 1000 Jewish children is a story that every one should know....