In this young adult anthology, many people of color share their stories of oppression, discrimination, and triumph. "I constantly questioned myself as a child. All of the positive images of people I'd seen were white. To be beautiful, you not only had to be stick-skinny, with no behind, you had to have long silky blond hair and blue eyes, a thin nose, and thin lips. I just didn't measure up." -Charisse Nesbit, Maryland These true stories from every part of America tell what it was like growing up in world where the color of people's skin set them apart. How do you feel when a teacher doesn't believe that you wrote the story he thinks is great? How can you make friends and belong in a black school when your father is black and your mother is Puerto Rican? What do you do when you're working in the kitchen of a summer camp in Vermont, but you're not allowed to swim in the camp lake? All the writers' pain, confusion, humiliation, and rage are vividly expressed, but many of them went on to realize their dreams against overwhelming odds. Their voices offer hope, inspiration, and a challenge to us all.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, this is an extraordinary, unprecedented anthology of diaries written by children all across Nazi-occupied Europe and in England. Twenty-three young people, ages ten through eighteen, recount in vivid detail the horrors they lived through, day after day. As powerful as The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary, here are children's experiences - all written with an unguarded eloquence that belies their years. The diarists include a Hungarian girl, selected by Mengele to be put in a line of prisoners who were tortured and murdered; a Danish Christian boy executed by the Nazis for his partisan work; and a twelve-year-old Dutch boy who lived through the Blitzkrieg in Rotterdam. In the Janowska death camp, eleven-year-old Pole Janina Heshele so inspired her fellow prisoners with the power of her poetry that they found a way to save her from the Nazi ovens. Mary Berg was imprisoned at sixteen in the Warsaw ghetto even though her mother was American and Christian. She left an eyewitness record of ghetto atrocities, a diary she was able to smuggle out of captivity. Moshe Flinker, a sixteen-year-old Netherlander, was betrayed by an informer who led the Gestapo to his family's door; Moshe and his parents died in Auschwitz in 1944. They come from Czechoslovakia, Austria, Israel, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, England, and Denmark. They write in spare, searing prose of life in ghettos and concentration camps, of bombings and Blitzkriegs, of fear and courage, tragedy and transcendence. Their voices and their vision ennoble us all.

Israeli Jews and Palestinians appear side by side for the first time in this remarkable book to share powerful feelings and reflections on growing up in one of the world's longest and most dangerous conflicts. Here, thirty-six men and women, boys and girls, tell of their coming-of-age in a land of turmoil.

From kibbutzim in Israel and the occupied territories to Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israeli Jews and Palestinians tell of tragedy and transcendence as they face their deepest fears and dream of a peaceful future. Listen to them as they recount stories of their brief and often violent youth.

No matter what their ethnic identity, how much and how long they have suffered, these courageous autobiographers most often reveal a deep longing for peace. Perhaps their hopes and fears are best illustrated by a parable retold by eighteen-year-old Redrose (a pseudonym):

"Two frogs got trapped in a jar of cream. They couldn't jump out of the liquid and they couldn't climb because the sides of the jar were slippery. One frog said, 'By dawn I'll be dead,' and went to sleep. The second frog swam all night long and in the morning found herself floating on a pat of butter."