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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: 'Hana's Suitcase' marks 20 years of teaching young readers about the Holocaust
Description: The book Hana's Suitcase by Canadian author Karen Levine has been translated into 40 languages, won over a dozen literary prizes, adapted into a stage play and been the subject of a documentary.
The book tells the story of how a wartime suitcase belonging to a Czech Holocaust victim, 13-year-old Hana Brady, wound up in a Japanese museum in 1999. The curator's search for Hana's identity would reveal more about how she lived in the Theresienstadt camp, before the Nazis murdered her in Auschwitz. But it also led the Japanese researcher to find Hana's surviving older brother, George Brady...