The story of how an impoverished three-member Catholic farm family saved thirteen Jews from the Holocaust in Lithuania, seven of them escapees from Kovno Ghetto. All sixteen lived and as of 2015, five of the Jews are still living. This book is being used in public and private schools, colleges and universities, as well as in Holocaust conferences in the U.S. and in Europe. Izzy's Fire was nominated by a People's Choice Award by the Library of Virginia in 2006.

In 1941 Laibale Gillman was a typical teenager living in Kaunas, Lithuania, when Nazi troops forced his family and thousands of other Jews into Kovno Ghetto, where they endured persistent threats of beatings, starvation and death. Laibale, showing courage beyond his years, lived up to his nickname of "the Little Lion," and devised a plan that helped several family members escape to freedom--at a time when some 40,000 individuals (the vast majority of them Jews) were being executed within a...