"A LUCKY CHILD: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy" is Thomas Buergenthal's story of survival against incredible odds during the Second World War, first at the Ghetto in Kielce, Poland (which was later wiped out by the Germans), Auschwitz (where he was imprisoned between August 1944 and January 1945, when he with other able bodied survivors were forced to march on foot in the depths of winter into Germany shortly before Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops), and Sachsenhausen, where he was liberated by the Soviets in April 1945. Thomas was by then 10 years old, the only child to have survived the Auschwitz Death March. 

Burgenthal's story is a heart-searing, honest, and powerfully poignant account of the human cost of the Nazi Holocaust, and of the resilience of one of its survivors to endure, persevere, and make a life for himself in the U.S. as one of the world's leading international human rights law experts

Above on sale for kindle this month - in US at least.   Also Martin's Wild Card series has a few volumes on sale. Coretta Scott King's Memoir, House of  Cards books, Hair Story, Native Guard (poetry, really good poetry), Chronicles of Kazam, Conversation with Mandela (with Obama) are also on sale.

There are several YA and children's Afro-American history titles as well.

Comixology sale on Transformers, Lumberjanes, Goldie Vance, Star Wars, and Dr. Strange

The Butterfly is fictional account of two young girls, Sevrine and Monique, during the Holocaust whose friendship came out of childhood curiosity and kindness. Monique's mother hid Sevrine and her family from the tall boots, the Nazi's, in order to help them escape the turmoil impacting their village. One night Sevrine and Monique were spotted by a neighbor leading to Sevrine's family immediately fleeing the country. Although Sevrine and Monique were afraid of losing one another, they remained hopeful in the darkest of times.I would use use this book during a Social Studies unit about the Holocaust. It would integrate nicely with an English Language Arts creative writing assignment. Students could write letters from the perspectives of Sevrine and Monique to one another. The LEXILE reading level is 430L.

When I was in graduate school I read many books that shaped my understanding of historical events, but few did so as profoundly as Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. By using a battalion of reservists as a case study, Browning showed the process by which men not motivated by ideology or hatred or careerism became participants, even enthusiastic ones, in the execution and deportation of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

Though Browning referenced the experiments undertaken by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo to explain the psychology of their participation, it's also easy to see the germ of his argument in Hannah Arendt's famous book. For while he was a member of the Nazi Party and a member of its security apparatus, Arendt argues that Adolf Eichmann was less a committed anti-Semite than someone who craved the structure of being part of a larger organization that would give him purpose. Many people have taken this as something of an exoneration of what Eichmann did in his role organizing the deportation of Jewish people, yet this is a misreading of Arendt's analysis, as she makes it clear that Eichmann took pride in his accomplishments and she dismantles his efforts to hide behind the governmental hierarchy. What makes her book so powerful is the sense she conveys of Eichmann, who justified to himself the facilitation of the murder of millions as part of a greater enterprise of which he was proud to serve. Is it this sense of mission devoid of ideology which is at the heart of her assertion of Eichmann's banality.

In the decades since Arendt's book has been published some writers have criticized her for minimizing Eichmann's ideological devotion to Nazism. And while works such as Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem do offer important qualifications of Arendt's interpretation of her subject, her book remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the motivations of the men and women who carried out the murder of millions of people. For while racism was an undoubted motivation for some, for many others it was a matter of duty, an enjoyment of the power held, or simply a sense of going along with the group. In many ways that was far more horrifying than the anti-Semitism that sparked the Holocaust in the first place: the people who don't just do nothing in the face of evil, but who enable it with their indifferent participation.