The only series for MYP 4 and 5 developed in cooperation with the International Baccalaureate (IB)Develop your skills to become an inquiring learner; ensure you navigate the MYP framework with confidence using a concept-driven and assessment-focused approach presented in global contexts.- Develop conceptual understanding with key MYP concepts and related concepts at the heart of each chapter.- Learn by asking questions with a stateme...

Lily wants to get home. Her friends want to get even.Lily needs a ride—a fire warning in Oregon has cancelled her train home to California. Her ex-best friend, Natasha, has offered to pick Lily up on her way back from Portland, though they're barely on speaking terms. As it turns out, Natasha's also giving a ride to Elke Azizi, the girl Lily got expelled from their school four years ago. Elke hasn't forgotten, and neither has Natasha.It's getting tense in t...

Nate Leipciger, a thoughtful, shy eleven-year-old boy, is plunged into an incomprehensible web of ghettos, concentration and death camps during the German occupation of Poland. As he struggles to survive, he forges a new, unbreakable bond with his father and yearns for a free future. But when he is finally liberated, the weight of his pain will not ease, and his memories remain etched in tragedy. Introspective, complicated and raw, The Weight of Freedom is Nate’s journey through a...

Strong-willed and ambitious, sixteen-year-old Elsa Thon is working as a photographer’s apprentice when the Nazis occupy her town of Pruszków, Poland in 1939. Every ounce of her will and ingenuity is called into play as she moves from ghetto to ghetto, throws in her lot with a Zionist youth group and is recruited by the Jewish underground. Despite her deep belief that destiny is determining her fate, Elsa faces every fraught situation with self-possession and maturity. A vivid and beautiful...

When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, fifteen-year-old Miklos Friedman drew on his wits to survive. Recruited into forced labour, sent to a ghetto and, ultimately, to the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Mühldorf, Miklos never stopped fighting to change his fate. After the war, he risked everything in order to leave his past behind. Decades later, a chance meeting in Toronto led Miklos, now Michael Mason, to discover the power of his new name.

Felix Opatowski is only fifteen years old when he takes on the perilous job of smuggling goods out of the Lodz ghetto in exchange for food for his starving family. It is a skill that will serve him well as he tries to stay alive in Nazi-occupied Poland. With dogged determination, Felix endures months of harrowing conditions in the ghetto and slave labour camps until he is deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the fall of 1943. Gatehouse to Hell is a candid and heart-ren...

For six desperate years, Willie Sterner’s skill as a painter saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis. Faced with inhumane conditions in slave labour camps and grieving the loss of his close-knit family, Sterner relied on courage and ingenuity to hold onto his dignity. Through almost random luck, he came under the protection of the famed Oskar Schindler and became his personal art restorer. An unvarnished account of what he experienced and what he lost, The Shadows Behind Me...

Almost forty years after the end of the war, Claire Baum opens a package from a stranger in Rotterdam, unleashing a flood of repressed memories from her childhood. As Claire delves into her past, she uncovers the personal sacrifice and bravery of her parents, the Dutch resistance and the families that selflessly gave shelter to her and her sister, Ollie. The Hidden Package portrays Claire’s years spent in hiding and pays tribute to all those who played a part in saving her life an...

Ten-year-old Felicia Steigman is confused by the sudden disruption to her life when she is expelled from school and forced to wear a yellow star. But she is completely unprepared for what happens next – the forced abandonment of her home and a gruelling journey, overseen by cruel Romanian Nazi collaborators, to Transnistria, a squalid place that doesn’t even exist on a map. Surviving three years surrounded by devastation and death, Felicia’s innocence disappears. When her family’s sufferin...

In the spring of 1944, as Germany occupied her native Hungary, Anna Hegedűs barely had time to notice the flowers blooming around her. One year later, as the lilacs blossomed once again, she returned to her hometown of Szatmár and set her memories, raw and vivid, to paper. Her unflinching words convey the bitter details of the Szatmár ghetto, Auschwitz, the Schlesiersee forced labour camp and a perilous death march. At forty-eight years old, Anna had survived a lifetime of trauma, and a...

Two Jewish girls born six months apart — Judy Abrams in Hungary and Eva Felsenburg Marx in Czechoslovakia — are only children when they are thrown into the turmoil and terror of World War II. At seven, Judy’s mother leaves her at a convent where she must adopt a new Christian identity. Eva is first sent away at two, then again at six, in disguise and tearful. Separated from their parents, forced to “pass” as Christian children, coping with dangers they barely understand, these evocative an...

In June 1942, when twelve-year-old Gerta is deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt ghetto – the Nazis' deceptive "model Jewish settlement" – her family helps her cope with the surrounding devastation. Later, alone in Auschwitz, Gerta is determined to survive the unbearable. Her intrepid spirit and keen observation guides her anew through post-war communism to freedom in Canada.