Ordered to play for the Jewish prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp, young German violinist Gottfried Keller reluctantly complies in spite of his growing horror about the camp's atrocities and his own culpability in renewing its prisoners' hopes.

"The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary follows Morel, a Frenchman who survives the Holocaust - a survival he credits to imagining elephants roaming the wilderness. Once free, he travels to French Equatorial Africa with the aim of saving his beloved elephants from being hunted and killed for meat and ivory. Realizing his more conventional tactics are not eliciting a response, however, he turns militant, and the story takes a dark turn. This novel examines...

It is 1942 and Eva has boarded a train to Auschwitz. Exhausted from standing up for days, she can think only of her longed-for reunion with her husband Michal, who was sent there months earlier. But when Eva arrives at Auschwitz, there is no sign of Michal and the reality of the camp comes crashing down upon her. As she lies shivering on a thin mattress, her head shaved by rough hands, she hears a whisper. Her bunkmate, Sofie, is reaching out her...