Gay, Roxane. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Harper Perennial, 2018.

In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied” for speaking out. Contributions include essays from established and up-and-coming writers, performers, and critics, including actors Ally Sheedy and Gabrielle Union and writers Amy Jo Burns, Lyz Lenz, and Claire Schwartz.

Harding, Kate. Asking For It: the Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It. Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2015.

Every seven minutes, someone in America commits a rape. And whether that's a football star, beloved celebrity, elected official, member of the clergy, or just an average Joe (or Joanna), there's probably a community eager to make excuses for that person. In Asking for It, Kate Harding combines in-depth research with a frank, no-holds-barred voice to make the case that twenty-first-century America supports rapists more effectively than it supports victims.

Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help. Sourcebooks Inc, 2019.

Revised and updated to include current studies, politics, and discussions, The Macho Paradox by pioneering anti-violence educator Jackson Katz is the first book to show how violence against women is a male issue as well as a female one — and how we can come together to stop it. The Macho Paradox incorporates the voices and experiences of women and men who have confronted the problem from all angles, the discussions surrounding currents events in politics and pop-culture, and where the violence is ignored or encouraged in our upbringing.

Krakauer, Jon. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town. Doubleday, 2015.

In these pages, acclaimed journalist Jon Krakauer investigates a spate of campus rapes that occurred in Missoula over a four-year period. Taking the town as a case study for a crime that is sadly prevalent throughout the nation, Krakauer documents the experiences of five victims: their fear and self-doubt in the aftermath; the skepticism directed at them by police, prosecutors, and the public; their bravery in pushing forward and what it cost them.

Luther, Jessica. Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape. Edge Of Sports: Akashic Books, 2016.

This book is about a different kind of playbook: the one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It's a deep dive into how different institutions--the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media--run the same plays over and over again when these stories break. If everyone runs his play well, scrutiny dies down quickly, no institution ever has to change how it operates, and the evaporation of these cases into nothingness looks natural. In short, this playbook is why nothing ever changes.

Stryker, Kitty. Ask: Building Consent Culture. Thorntree Press, 2017.

In Ask, Kitty Stryker assembles a retinue of writers, journalists, and activists to examine how a cultural politic centered on consent can empower us outside the bedroom, whether it’s at the doctor’s office, interacting with law enforcement, or calling out financial abuse within radical communities. More than a collection of essays, Ask is a testimony and guide on the role that negated consent plays in our lives, examining how we can take those first steps to reclaim it from institutionalized power.

Traister, Rebecca. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

With eloquence and fervor, Rebecca Traister tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Here Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is perceived based on its owner; as well as the history of caricaturing and delegitimizing female anger; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel—as is most certainly occurring today.

Chemaly, Soraya.Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger. Atria Books, 2018.

As women, we’ve been urged for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet there are so, so many legitimate reasons for us to feel angry, ranging from blatant, horrifying acts of misogyny to the subtle drip, drip drip of daily sexism that reinforces the absurdly damaging gender norms of our society. In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly argues that our anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. We are so often encouraged to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them?

Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. HarperCollins, 2017.

Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

Sebold, Alice. Lucky. Scribner, 1999.

In a memoir hailed for its searing candor, as well as its wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What ultimately propels this chronicle of sexual assault and its aftermath is Sebold’s indomitable spirit, as she fights to secure her rapist’s arrest and conviction and comes to terms with a relationship to the world that has forever changed.

This lesson plan was created in 2018 to guide teachers through focused examinations of community responses to the Ebola Outbreak in Sierra Leone that the film Survivors documents. In our current moment, the nature of teaching and learning have drastically shifted to accommodate the necessity of social distancing and slowing the spread of COVID-19. We hope this lesson plan will serve as a resource to spark conversations about the novel coronavirus by using the successful response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak as a springboard for thought and reflection. We invite you to adapt this resource to best fit the current moment as is appropriate for your students and we hope you are well, staying healthy, and holding faith in our collective capacity to endure.

After all, what Survivors teaches us is that collectively, with kindness, patience, and solidarity in action, we can survive.

In a rehabilitation shelter in Ghana, two children are recovering from enslavement to fishermen. But their story takes an unexpected turn when their rescuer embarks on another mission and asks the children for help. Charting the unfolding drama, The Rescue List tells a moving story of friendship and courage—transcending tropes of victimhood and illustrating what it means to love and survive.

Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. University of California Press, 2012.

Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable.

Konadu, Kwasi and Clifford C. Campbell. The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Duke University Press, 2016.

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast's importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana's brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume's eighty selections emphasize Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They also demonstrate that the path to fully understanding Ghana requires acknowledging its ethnic and cultural diversity and listening to its population's varied voices.

Lawrance, Benjamin N. and Richard L. Roberts. Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa. Ohio University Press, 2012.

This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the “end of slavery” in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children. Contemporary forms of human trafficking are deeply interwoven with their historical precursors, and scholars and activists need to be informed about the long history of trafficking in order to better assess and confront its contemporary forms.

Okeowo, Alexis. A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa. Hachette Books, 2017.

In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram. This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary--lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.

Polman, Linda. The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong With Humanitarian Aid? Picador, 2011.

In her controversial, no-holds-barred exposé Linda Polman shows how a vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid. The Crisis Caravan takes us to war zones around the globe, showing how aid operations and the humanitarian world have become a feature of military strategy. Impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman "gives some powerful examples of unconscionable assistance...a world where aid workers have become enablers of the atrocities they seek to relieve" (The Boston Globe).

Several years ago, we met a Ghanaian man who told us his story of being trafficked into modern slavery as a child. He described enduring six years enslaved to fishermen who forced him to work on fishing boats on Lake Volta in Ghana. Eventually, he managed to escape, return home, and start kindergarten at age 13. As an adult, he assembled a courageous grassroots team to rescue and reunite trafficked children with their families.

His story shocked us and the statistics staggered us. Today, there are more than 45 million people enslaved worldwide, including over 18,000 children enslaved on Lake Volta alone. Despite its prevalence, human trafficking and modern slavery remain a hidden issue. Traffickers operate in the shadows of society, preying on economically and socially disadvantaged populations around the world. In part, it is the invisibility of modern slavery that allows it to persist.

As our relationship with the rescue team developed, we felt that we had a unique opportunity to shine a light on this issue through their work.

From the beginning, we wanted to empower the children in our film by telling the story from their perspectives, but it was of critical importance to us that their recoveries be paramount. We decided to make the film observationally. Our film intimately follows Peter and Edem as they work to recover from their trauma, viscerally portraying our protagonists’ day-to-day lives in recovery, rather than focusing on their past. By bearing witness to their daily lives, we sought to provide the children with a forum to tell their own stories through their words and actions. We found that this process of following the action, and telling the story through slow disclosure, conveyed the children’s gaps in memory and knowledge of what happened to them, while also revealing the steadfast friendships that enabled them to survive - something we had not expected. Through this observational process of discovery, authentic themes emerged: friendship, belonging, and survival. These themes are human universals that we all identify with and experience. We believe that character-driven stories like these humanize issues of global importance, moving audiences through the power of this universal connection.

Our observational approach is guided by our backgrounds in ethnographic filmmaking and our commitment to cross-cultural understanding. As outsiders to this community, we endeavored to understand the complexity of this human rights issue from a culturally relative point of view and to reflect that in the film. It was not our intention to villainize anyone, but rather to reveal the circumstances that create an environment in which children are exploited. We worked as a small three person team, embedded in the community, and immersed in our participants’ daily lives. Collaboration, reciprocity, and trust lay at the heart of our process. This allowed us to build strong relationships with our participants and create a film grounded in respect and understanding. By taking this approach, we witnessed a moving story of friendship, courage, and belonging that transcends the trope of victimhood, and shows us what it truly means to love and survive. We hope that audiences connect with the individuals in our film on a personal level, and come away with a better understanding of the complexity of trafficking, as well as a sense of hope for the future.

- Alyssa Fedele & Zachary Fink, Directors, The Rescue List

"The Rescue List opened my mind to modern [day] slavery by sharing real traumas and tears from real kids."

Aibis (age 12)

For many, the concept of slavery is something that is relegated to another time or was a system practiced by former generations who were inexplicably cruel; however, The Rescue List demands that we grow our collective consciousness to include the realities of modern-day slavery and the global implications in today’s world.

This lesson offers an opportunity for students to critically consider the human rights implications of chattel slavery and of modern slavery by juxtaposing the experiences of the protagonists in The Rescue List with experiences of Frederick Douglass as shared in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through a guided analysis of the childrens’ experiences with slavery and abolition in present-day Ghana and Douglass’s 18th century experiences of slavery and abolition, students will be asked to think critically about the lasting legacy and persistence of slavery in order to imagine actionable alternatives.

In this lesson, students conduct a Socratic seminar in preparation for creating a plan of action to bring attention to the plight of children, families, communities, and nations directly impacted by the legacy of slavery, both now and then. Tens of millions of people around the world, including children, are forced to work as slaves. What can be done to help them?

This plan of action is malleable and will depend upon grade level and specific areas of impact, need, and/or interest in the school communities using this curriculum. The structured conversation that grows out of the Socratic seminar will help students ground their questions and proposed solutions in their written plans of action.

Note:

This lesson was a collaboration created by Vivett Dukes and a group of 7th grade student volunteers in Jamaica, NY.

OBJECTIVES

In this lesson, students will:

• Learn about the real-life implications of modern slavery;
• Assess and evaluate the events leading up to, and following, the rescue from slavery of the three protagonists on Ghana’s Lake Volta;
• Identify, reflect upon, write about, and discuss their own biases/ignorance regarding both present-day and historic slavery;
• Examine current human rights laws in order to identify flaws in, and create suggestions towards, improving the enactment of global human rights practices;.
• Respond verbally and in writing to a variety of questions varying in complexity (ex. recall, basic reasoning, analysis, synthesis, and interpretation)
• Exhibit and hone active listening skills by practicing question-based, class-wide discussion

Grade Levels: 7th grade - 12th grade

Subject Areas

Civics / Government

Earth Science / Ecology

English Language Arts

Humanities

Global History / Global Studies

U.S. History

Social Studies

MATERIALS :

• Film clips and equipment to project/screen the film clips
• Notebook
• Writing utensil
• Scholastic UPFRONT magazine articles about chattel and modern-day slavery.
• Student-generated, text-based open-ended questions (Depth of Knowledge - DOK - Level 1 through Level 4)
• Various supplementary reading materials

ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED:

Two to four 45-minute class periods (with optional homework in between)

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The Changing Same is a short film that examines the legacy that white supremacist violence, in the form of lynching, leaves in its wake. This film documents poet and professor Lamar Wilson’s as he grapples with the brutal lynching of Claude Neal. Neal was publicly murdered by a white lynchmob in Wilson’s hometown of Marianna, Florida in 1934. The Changing Same asks viewers to consider the lasting impacts that histories of racial violence have on the people and communities in the present.

Viewers are called to consider themes of redemption, reconciliation, and accountability on the long road towards acknowledging and confronting the realities of white supremacist terrorism. They are also asked to address the question:

Is Marianna really that much different than other American towns haunted by histories of racial violence and lynching?

This lesson plan guides students through similar questions while offering important concepts and definitions to facilitate a respectful grappling with legacies of racism and racial violence in American history. This lesson is intended for a high school aged audience, but could be adapted to meet the needs of college students as well.

Students sometimes see the study of history an irrelevant exercise in memorizing a bunch of facts about dead people. But many current debates are directly related to historical memory – specific narratives created and upheld by groups of people about events in history – also called collective memory. For example, should we: Re-name buildings or remove statues honoring Confederate heroes or slave traders? Suspend high school students “sneaking” coded white nationalist images into yearbooks or taking to social media to share photos of their Hitler-style salutes? Exclude uncomfortable stories from state-approved social studies curricula?

This lesson provides students with an opportunity to explore the function of public remembering. Using clips from the film The Silence of Othersstudents will learn about Spain’s Amnesty Law, a law that gave amnesty to officials from the Franco dictatorship who committed atrocities and forbade investigating about their crimes, leading to a “Pact of Forgetting”. They’ll hear from victims about the impact of silence, and use what they learn to write about a current event related to historical memory.

OBJECTIVES

In this lesson, students will:

• Learn about “The Pact of Forgetting” as a response to the end of Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain, and about Spain’s transition from a dictatorship to a democracy.
• Explore the different functions of individual and collective memory
• Understand the impact of silence on victims of crimes committed by the state, including crimes against humanity.
• Write a blog post or letter to the editor indicating their position on a current event or policy involving historical memory

GRADE LEVELS:9-12

SUBJECT AREAS

• History (World War II; Civil War; Jim Crow)
• Civics / Government
• Current Events
• Research Skills
• Global Studies
• Language Arts
• Law & Justice
• Civil Rights Movement
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Human Rights
• International Relations

MATERIALS

Film clips and a way to screen them in class; Internet access or hard copies for each student of the initial reading.

ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED:1 class period, plus homework

This is a movie about women, by women. In this film, the women are the heroes; and I am inserting their stories, lives and voices into the world and into the fabric of history. They hold this court and this movie together because they are the ones creating change and telling us the way life really is out there in the streets of New York City and the world.

I am a first-generation Chinese-American raised in Youngstown, Ohio. I am one of four girls. I grew up in a culture where women were always considered to be inferior to men. BLOWIN’ UP is my response to the institutional ways we think of gender and sex. I support the choices of all women even if I would not make certain choices for myself. I believe all women deserve equality and freedom and know I am in no position to tell women what that equality and freedom should look like.

BLOWIN’ UP is my homage to all the resilient women who have come before me, who bore all the pain and injustices brought upon them so that my generation could thrive. I will remain silent no more.

—Stephanie Wang-Breal, Director, BLOWIN' UP

How We Started

In 2010, the story of Spain’s “stolen children” began to come out. The story of these crimes, with roots in the early days of Franco’s rule, led us to explore the marginalization and silencing of victims of many Franco-era crimes, ranging from extrajudicial killings at the end of the Spanish Civil War to torture that took place as recently as 1975. As we began to learn more, we were baffled by basic questions: how could it be that Spain, unlike other countries emerging from repressive regimes, had had no Nuremberg Trials, no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, no national reckoning? Why, instead, was a “pact of forgetting” forged in Spain? And what were the consequences of that pact, 40 years into democracy, for the still-living victims of Franco’s dictatorship? When we began filming the process of the Argentine lawsuit in 2012, which challenged this status quo, few thought that it would amount to much. But as we filmed those early meetings, we could see that the lawsuit was stirring up something vital, transforming victims and survivors into organizers and plaintiffs and bringing out dozens, and then hundreds, of testimonies from all over Spain. As the number of testimonies snowballed, the case was building into a persuasive argument about crimes against humanity that demanded international justice. We thus discovered that The Silence of Others was going to be a story about possibilities, about trying to breach a wall, and that, rather than focusing on what had happened in the past, it would be all about the present and the future. For many of the plaintiffs, the case would offer the last opportunity in their lifetimes to be heard. Yet even as we set out filming those early meetings, we could scarcely have imagined that we would follow this story for six years.

Perspective and Process

The stories that we were uncovering touched each of us deeply: Almudena is a Spaniard whose parents were raised under Franco, and who grew up in Spain during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Robert is an American who has been involved with human rights issues since he was 19, and the fight against Fascism during the Spanish Civil War had always been close to his heart.

Point-of-View

This was a film that had to work inside and outside Spain. It needed the cultural sensitivity, the shared subconscious, and intricate contextual details of a film made by a Spaniard, and Almudena, who was born just before Franco died, returned home to Spain, after 12 years in the US, to make this film. While most of the crew was Spanish, it was also crucial that there be an international team, and Robert’s outsider perspective greatly shaped the film, unpacking assumptions and making it bigger and more universal.

As Judge María Servini says near the end of the film, “If the judges in Spain could hear what I have heard, they would open these cases here, too”. Likewise, we hope that when people hear the stories that we have heard over the seven years of making The Silence of Others, and see the fear and the pain that we have seen, they too will view this less as a political issue, and more as a human rights – or just a human – issue.

—Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, Directors and Producers, The Silence of Others

Friends usher in the Sabbath – called by its Hebrew name Shabbat – by candlelight, with challah bread and grape juice to complement their chicken nuggets and fries. Shabbat is typically observed at home with family, but here these seniors share in the celebration at a fast-food Wendy’s. Wendy’s Shabbat is a story of rediscovering the joys of community in older age, however unorthodox it may appear.

Durrett, Charles. The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living. New Society, 2009.
Senior Cohousing is a comprehensive guide to joining or creating a cohousing project, written by the U.S. leader in the field. The author deals with all the psychological and logistical aspects of senior cohousing, and addresses common concerns, fears, and misunderstandings.

London, Charles. Far from Zion. New York: William Morrow, 2009.
London tells the stories of the Jews who stayed behind, choosing to remain in the countries of their birthAdAdult rather than immigrating to the Holy Land of Israel. At once a riveting modern history of a scattered People of the Book and London’s moving story of his own personal odyssey of religious and cultural discovery.

Parker, Priya. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show us what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Zakutinksy, Ruth. Around Sarah’s Table: Ten Hasidic Women Share Their Stories of Life, Faith, and Tradition. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Fast paced but reverent, Around Sarah’s Table introduces us to the unique experience of living life as a Hasidic woman, and reminds us that beyond all the labels that tend to keep us apart, we are all very much alike.

As the Holocaust survivor community ages, the USC Shoah Foundation has embarked on an ambitious new project to transform survivors into 3D digital projections. 116 Cameras follows Eva Schloss, a survivor of Auschwitz and stepsister of Anne Frank, through her story as an interactive hologram that will have conversations with generations to come.

Frankl, Viktor Emil. Man’s Search for Meaning.Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust: The Complete Text of the Film. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
The Nazi extermination of Jews is examined through interviews of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators and through footage of the sites of the death camps and environs as they appear today. Those interviewed include Jewish survivors of the death camps and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Polish farmers and villagers who lived near the camps and Nazis who worked in the camps and the ghettos.

Lee, Carol Ann. The Hidden Life of Otto Frank.New York: Morrow, 2003.
In this definitive new biography, Carol Ann Lee provides the answer to one of the most heartbreaking questions of modern times: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis? Probing this startling act of treachery, Lee brings to light never before documented information about Otto Frank and the individual who would claim responsibility -- revealing a terrifying relationship that lasted until the day Frank died.

Rajchman, Chil. The Last Jews of Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory 1942-1943.New York: Pegasus Books, 2011.
Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls; in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution. There was no pretense of work here like in Auschwitz or Birkenau, only a train platform and a road covered with sand. A road that led only to death. But not for the author, a young man who survived working as a "barber" and "dentist," heartsick with witnessing atrocity after atrocity. Yet he managed to survive so that somehow he could tell the world what he had seen.

Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences.Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Provides a comprehensive guide to oral history for researchers and students in diverse fields including history, sociology, anthropology, education, psychology, social work, and ethnographic methods. The text tackles not just the practicalities of interviewing but also the varied ethical, legal, and philosophical questions that can arise, and allows for dedicated discussion of both legalities and ethics.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
It is 1944. The Jews of Sighet, Hungary are rounded up and driven into Nazi concentration camps. For the next terrible year, young Elie Wiesel experiences the loss of everything he loves --- home, friends, family --- in an agonizing journey through Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald. The greatest tragedy of our time, told through the eyes of a 15-year old boy.