Winner of the Honor Book award in the 2003 Society of School Librarians International Awards program
Selected as a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize
Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Nonfiction Titles 2003

Tapestry of Hope is an extraordinary anthology of writing about the Holocaust for young people. Irene N. Watts and Lillian Boraks-Nemetz have gathered well-known published writing and new first-person accounts, to reveal the heartbreak, courage, and hope that define one of history’s darkest hours.

The editors present writing about hiding from the Nazis, life in the ghetto, resistance, the camps, escape, survival, and life after the Holocaust. Selections include poetry, prose, and first-hand accounts such as Andre Stein’s Hidden Children, Jack Kuper’s Child of the Holocaust, Jason Shermon’s A Blessing in Disguise, Kathy Kacer’s Gaby’s Dresser, Eva Wiseman’s My Canary Yellow Star, Leonard Cohen’s All There is to Know about Adolph Eichmann, Jean Little writing about Anne Frank, Karen Levine’s Hannah’s Suitcase, and many others.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz was born in Warsaw, Poland, and is a child survivor of the Holocaust. She escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the remainder of the war in hiding under a false identity. Boraks-Nemetz graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature. She is an author of an award winning novel The Old Brown Suitcase followed by The Sunflower Diary and the Lenski File, as well as two volumes of poetry Ghost Children and Garden of Steel. She has translated Polish Emigre poetry into English and has also co-compiled the YA anthology of Canadian Holocaust writing, Tapestry of Hope. From 1980-2016, Boraks-Nemetz worked at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Center. She often speaks to students about the consequences of racism, as a member of the Holocaust Center’s Outreach Program. She is a board member of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz's profile page

In 1968 Irene N. Watts came to Canada from Britain, where she had arrived thirty years earlier from Germany, via Kindertransport. She is a writer/playwright, theatre director, and educator. Her plays for young audiences have been widely produced. Awards include a Vancouver Theatre Alliance Jessie Richardson for Goodbye Marianne (Scirocco Drama and Anchorage Press, U.S.); the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People; the Isaac Frischwasser Memorial Award (Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards, 1999 and 2001); the Government of Alberta Achievement Award for Outstanding Service to Drama. Irene is a Lifetime Member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Recent publications include Tapestry of Hope: Holocaust Writing for Young People, compiled with Lillian Boraks-Nemetz (Tundra Books).

Irene N. Watts' profile page

“Tapestry of Hope is an important reference work for teachers of the Holocaust in secondary schools and colleges…this anthology is a complex answer to the often-asked question: Why did so many survivors of the Holocaust wait so long before telling their stories?”
–The Globe and Mail
“…a timely addition to Holocaust resources.”
–Quill & Quire
“…very useful in a classroom situation when teaching about the Holocaust because a teacher has a large number of excerpts from which to choose… Tapestry of Hope has good educational value for both a history and a language arts program. Highly Recommended.”
–CM Magazine