"Luna's Life: A Journey of Forgiveness and Triumph" by Luna Kaufman.
ComteQ Publishing (Margate, N.J., 2009). 326 pp., $19.95.

"Gertruda's Oath: A Child, A Promise and a Heroic Escape During World War II" by Ram Oren.
Doubleday (New York, 2009). 308 pp., $24.95.

"Luna's Life" and "Gertruda's Oath" are stories of survival of Jewish children during the Holocaust. They will both challenge and spiritually uplift Catholic readers. The author of "Gertruda's Oath," Ram Oren, has been called the John Grisham of Israel, and well deserves the title. His book is an engrossing page turner and a true account of very real events. The hero of the story is not the child survivor, Michael, the son of a wealthy Polish Jewish family, but his Catholic nanny, Gertruda, who promises the boy's dying mother to bring the boy to Israel, to join his family there. She does, but how she does it is a tale told amid horror, narrow escapes and the saving kindness of Poles, such as the priest who takes them in, places the boy in his school (teaching him just enough about Catholicism to pass as one of his students) and even gives Gertruda a job (and false identity papers).

Another person who helped them survive, when they had been captured by the Germans and the boy's Jewishness was about to be revealed, was a Nazi SS officer. How he got there and why he risked his life to save a child he did not know is one of the absorbing subplots of the book. In contrast to the saving help of the SS officer is the betrayal of the two by the family's chauffer, who brings them out of Warsaw to relative safety, only to steal the car and all their belongings, including the meager amount of money Gertruda had brought with her to provide them with food and shelter. Gertruda and Michael live through the harrowing events of the time, from Kristallnacht and a harrowing escape from Warsaw just ahead of the German troops. At the end of the war they manage to get to a displaced persons camp run by the Allies and, ultimately, unto a ship bound (illegally) for Israel. The name of the ship was the Exodus.

"Luna's Life" is the author's firsthand account of how she and her family were herded into the ghetto of Krakow, rounded up with the other Jews, crowded into cattle cars and sent to the concentration camps. What she experienced there and how she survived is a compelling story. At one point, for example, she fashions a makeshift needle, scavenges the camp for loose threads and embroiders her camp number, 648, onto her striped prison dress. This was, for her, an act of defiance and assertion of her human identity, which the camps were designed to strip away from her as even the number on her clothing would fade away.

The "forgiveness and triumph" in the book's subtitle refers to her life in America after the death camps, and especially her experiences working on Holocaust education in Catholic and public schools with Msgr. John Oesterreicher and Dominican Sr. Rose Thering of the Institute for Jewish-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. That institute, established in 1953, was the first of its kind not only in the United States, but in the world. A culminating moment in her life, Kaufman writes, was her 1994 meeting with Pope John Paul II.

These books, taken together, tell us much about the human capacity not only for evil, but, more importantly, for goodness. And they can teach us much about what it means to be a Christian.

Fisher is the retired associate director for ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.