Torn Thread by Anne Isaacs

It is June 1943, and for four years the Nazi armies have occupied the Polish town of Bedzin. Twelve-year-old Eva, along with her father and her sister, have been forced to leave their comfortable home and move into a tiny attic in the Jewish Ghetto.

But Eva's life takes an even more terrifying turn when she and her sister are torn from their father and imprisoned in a Nazi work camp. There, Eva is forced to spin thread to make blankets and uniforms fo the German Army. As she struggles amid ever-worsening dangers to her life and that of her sick sister, Eva's world tears apart like the weak thread on her spinning machine...

In a noteworthy departure, Isaacs turns her considerable literary gifts to a painful subject, her mother-in-law's experiences as a teenage prisoner of a Nazi camp and transforms it into a powerful work of fiction. Like most stories of survival, this one is marked by unlikely turns and conjunctions, which, taken together, preserve the protagonist's life. Isaacs takes the measure of acts of casual cruelty or kindness and lets readers see the repercussions. Given its precise detail and sensitivity to unimaginable suffering, this gripping novel reads like the strongest of Holocaust memoirs. Ages 10-up.