Cezanne Is Missing »

Frank McMillan is a former executive director of the Texas A&M–Corpus Christi Foundation and teaches at Del Mar College. He delivered the 2004 Holocaust Remembrance Day address at Temple Beth El and spoke at the annual national conference of the Association of Holocaust Organizations and the annual conference of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He lives in Corpus Christi, Texas.

In the months following the atrocious events of September 11, a 15-year-old girl learns the story of her art teacher, a suvivor of Auschwitz and a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance. After frantic attempts to decode a diary written by her teacher's long-lost brother during World War II, she is suddenly drawn into the dangerous network of the underworld kidnappers who have targeted her teacher. Utterly clueless about this terrible epoch in history, she begins to see the link between hatred and intolerance throughout history. Set in New York City, the fast-paced, original plot is both educational and compelling.

Children's Literature

Lauren, a purple-haired, green-eyed teenager, is finishing up her art lesson with famous artist and Holocaust survivor Dominique Rosen, when bullies from the Russian Mafia bust in on the lesson and threaten Mrs. Rosen with the lives of her friends and family if she does not help them decode a diary written by her brother, Joshua, who was killed during the Holocaust. In the diary, Joshua, a hero in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, references famous works of art by Renoir, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, and Cezanne that he hid from the Nazis. After the Russians leave Mrs. Rosen and Lauren to consider their violent and nonnegotiable offer, Mrs. Rosen tells Lauren and her grandson, David (Lauren's love interest) about her experiences with the Nazis, "The Shoah is the Mount Everest of evil, soaring above the rest of history, there for all to see. Its living taproot is anti-Semitism and its deadly flower, the Holocaust, is a sin that will haunt humanity to the end of time. Paradoxically, it was mostly carried out by rather ordinary men who said they were simply doing their duty. Untold others, in Germany and many other places including America, sad to say, helped them by doing nothing. They simply turned their faces away. Self-imposed ignorance and hypocrisy are killers, too, my children. Always, always be alert for this." Along with a thrilling and suspenseful adventure, McMillan immerses his readers into the culture and lives of Holocaust victims in a beautifully and painfully realistic and moving depiction. Mild profanity is used by some of the characters.