From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring nineteen, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in which German authorities ransacked Jewish-owned buildings with sledgehammers. Ross was eight years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish village, forcing his family to flee. He spent his next six years in a day-to-day struggle to survive the notorious camps in which he was imprisoned, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau among them. When he was finally liberated, he no longer knew how old he was, he was literally starving to death, and everyone in his family except for his brother had been killed. Ross learned in his darkest experiences--by observing and enduring inconceivable cruelty as well as by receiving compassion from caring fellow prisoners--the human capacity to rise above even the bleakest circumstances. He decided to devote himself to underprivileged youth, aiming to ensure that despite the obstacles in their lives they would never experience suffering like he had. Over the course of a nearly forty-year career as a psychologist working in the Boston city schools, that was exactly what he did. At the end of his career, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial, a site millions of people including young students visit every year. Equal parts heartrending, brutal, and inspiring, From Broken Glass is the story of how one man survived the unimaginable and helped lead a new generation to forge a more compassionate world.

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to become the City of Boston's Director of Education and created the New England Holocaust Memorial, a wise and intimate memoir about finding strength in the face of despair and an inspiring meditation on how we can unlock the morality within us to build a better world. On October 29, 1939 Szmulek Rosental's life changed forever. Nazis marched into his home of Lodz, Poland, destroyed the synagogues, urinated on the Torahs, and burned the beards of the rabbis. Two people were killed that first day in the pillaging of the Jewish enclave, but much worse was to come. Szmulek's family escaped that night, setting out in search of safe refuge they would never find. Soon, all of the family would perish, but Szmulek, only eight years old when he left his home, managed to against all odds to survive. Through his resourcefulness, his determination, and most importantly the help of his fellow prisoners, Szmulek lived through some of the most horrific Nazi death camps of the Holocaust, including Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and seven others. He endured acts of violence and hate all too common in the Holocaust, but never before talked about in its literature. He was repeatedly raped by Nazi guards and watched his family and friends die. But these experiences only hardened the resolve to survive the genocide and use the experience--and the insights into morality and human nature that it revealed--to inspire people to stand up to hate and fight for freedom and justice. On the day that he was scheduled to be executed he was liberated by American soldiers. He eventually traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, where, with all of his friends and family dead, he made a new life for himself, taking the name Steve Ross. Working at the gritty South Boston schools, he inspired children to define their values and use them to help those around them. He went on to become Boston's Director of Education and later conceived of and founded the New England Holocaust Memorial, one of Boston's most visited sites. Taking readers from the horrors of Nazi Germany to the streets of South Boston, From Broken Glass is the story of one child's stunning experiences, the piercing wisdom into humanity with which they endowed him, and the drive for social justice that has come to define his life.

This collection of photographs presents photojournalist Renee C. Byer's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "A Mother's Journey," along with other early and recent photographs. "A Mother's Journey" is an intimate portrayal of a single mother's emotional and financial struggles as her son battles neuroblastoma, a rare form of childhood cancer. This year-long documentary project was originally published in the Sacramento Bee as a four-part series and on the Web as a multimedia package. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 2007, the series won a World Understanding Award as well the Society of Professional Journalist's Sigma Delta Chi Award for feature photography. "When done well," said Byer, "photojournalism is a powerful tool because it connects people to the reality of life and can bring understanding and awareness to important issues."