The Library is pleased to share news of the release of Doreen Rappaport’s volume Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, published by Candlewick Press. Rappaport is a prolific author whose notable publications include Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr., which received many awards and was counted among the New York Public Library’s 100 Best Books.

In Beyond Courage, she offers twenty stories of Jewish resistance spanning many countries, beginning in 1930s Germany (when two teenaged boys braved the rubble of a ruined synagogue to save twelve undamaged Torah scrolls), through internment in labor and death camps (from the well-known “revolt of the Sonderkommando” at Auschwitz-Birkenau to smaller, more private acts of resistance), to the actions of Jewish partisans.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Marc Aranson writes:

Rappaport’s devotion to uncovering these instances, whether issuing from academic papers, museums, interviews or memoirs, and her care with narrative structure, locating the rare archival images and using them generously throughout, is truly magnificent. On each page you sense that it meant everything to her to track down the truth and get it exactly right. As she says in her introduction, “These people and their stories are a seed inside me that keeps growing.”

More information about Beyond Courage and Rappaport’s other titles is available on her website.