Aranka Siegal, Czech-American author and Holocaust survivor

Aranka Siegal is a writer, Holocaust survivor, and recipient of the Newbery Honor and Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, both awarded to her in 1982. She is the author of three books, the best known of which is Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1930-1944, a memoir of her childhood in Hungary before her 12-month imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz – Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.