15 Trustworthy Holocaust Books to Read This Year

Education experts warn that some of the most popular books about the Holocaust today have serious flaws, giving readers inaccurate information and even leading readers to minimize the Holocaust and its impact.

Take the 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (and the 2008 movie based on the book). Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust found that fully 80% of British students studying the Holocaust had read it, yet advises against it due to the novel’s distortion of reality and inaccurate depiction of a young Jewish boy who is able to sit around all day long in the grass and make friends in Auschwitz, a historical impossibility. The Auschwitz Memorial Research Center has criticized the book, as well as the highly popular 2018 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which it claims is filled with “exaggerations, misinterpretations, and understatements.”

Getting facts wrong in fiction matters. Readers come away from beloved books with a new sense of the world, forged in the act of reading. When it comes to the Holocaust, relying on sloppy research, including inaccurate details, and creating implausible characters and situations can lead to countless readers coming away with dangerously wrong ideas about what the Holocaust actually entailed.

Recent research shows that ignorance about the Holocaust is reaching record levels. A 2020 survey of American young adults found that 10% had never heard the term “Holocaust”. 63% of respondents didn’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered; over a third believed that fewer than 2 million Jews were murdered. In Britain, over a quarter of young people don’t know that the Holocaust took place, according to another survey. Around the world, polls show similar findings.

At a time when records of antisemitic crimes are being smashed around the world and hatred of Jews is increasing, it’s more important than ever to learn about the Holocaust and understand how it unfolded. Here are 15 books to read this year about this terrible chapter in Jewish history.

Memoirs

No Holocaust book is as visceral as a first-person account. Here are seven memoirs to consider reading.

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, was imprisoned in Auschwitz for just over a year, from ages 22 to 24. Throughout his time in Auschwitz, Levi used his scientific training to minutely observe the goings on around him. He wrote Survival in Auschwitz immediately after his liberation there in 1945 on January 27 - the day that today is known as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald who Returned Home at Last by Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, who served as Chief Rabbi of Israel, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp when he was just seven years old. In this remarkable memoir, he describes his years as a child slave laborer in Buchenwald, his liberation at age eight, and how he eventually rebuilt his life in Israel.

I was a Doctor in Auschwitz by Gisella Perl

Dr. Gisella Perl was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where she was placed in charge of a barely equipped “hospital” and given responsibility for keeping alive 32,000 Jewish women who were kept alive for just a few months to work as slave laborers. In this memoir, Dr. Perl describes the conditions in which she worked, the sadism of the Nazi guards, and the inner strength and resilience of her many patients.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

The Austrian Jewish psychotherapist Viktor Frankl documented the horrors he endured over two and a half years in four Nazi concentration camps in this short, moving and incredibly famous memoir first published in 1946, then expanded later on. Dr. Frankl’ makes an incredibly forceful argument about the importance of feeling that one has something - some ideals or values or loved ones - for which to live.

He writes, "Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant."

A Daughter’s Gift of Love by Trudi Birger

Dr. Trudi Birger’s remarkable memoir describes her and her mother’s devotion to one another inside the hell of Stutthof concentration camp. When Trudi was too ill to work at the slave labor she other inmates were kept alive to perform, her mother performed the work of both of them; when Trudi’s mother sickened, Trudi drew on reserves of strength to complete her mother’s work, as well. One of the most moving elements of this memoir is its description of women who managed to keep their Jewish faith when facing torture and death.

Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal by Renia Spiegel with her sister, Elizabeth Bellak

Renia’s Diary bears many striking similarities to Anne Frank’s diary. Like Anne, Renia was born into a comfortable middle-class Jewish family. Like Anne, Renia began to write in her diary as a pre-teen and recorded her daily hopes, dreams and fears against the background of the Nazis’ rise. And Renia Spiegel never survived the Holocaust, murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. Her diary was later edited by her sister Elizabeth, who survived.

The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

This is a memoir, but not of a survivor. Daniel Mendelsohn records his painstaking multi-year quest to trace the lives and deaths of six of his relatives who perished in the Holocaust before he was even born. This beautiful memoir brings his family to life, contains copious details about the way the Holocaust unfolded and describes the way that the trauma of the Holocaust reverberates through generations.

Night by Elie Wiesel

This semi-autobiographical book follows the fate of a Jewish man named Eliezer who is deported to Auschwitz. In Wiesel’s devastating description of Auschwitz based on his own experiences there, Night describes the destruction of its protagonist, as Eliezer suffers terrible privation and torture and eventually loses his capacity to believe in goodness and beauty in the world he sees around him. Night is alternately considered fiction and memoir, as it is largely drawn on Wiesel’s own experiences, and yet contains some minor alterations to detail and was presented as a novel when it was first released.

Fiction

Holocaust fiction is very popular today. The best novels help readers feel immersed in the era, gaining an understanding of the complexities and the horrors of the Holocaust through fiction. One danger of Holocaust-themed literature is presenting a misleadingly simple or rosy view of this dark period in human history. Here are a few powerful novels set during the Holocaust that give a sense of the true horror of genocide.

Fateless by Imre Kertesz

This 1975 novel draws on the real-life Holocaust experiences of Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Kertesz’s novel is about a young Jewish boy in Hungary named Gyuri who is deported to Auschwitz, where he lies about his age in order to become a slave laborer and escape immediate death. The novel’s power is in describing Gyuri’s loss of innocence as he finds himself confronted with ever greater horrors and cruelty.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman

This book was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1992. It tells the harrowing story of Art Spiegelman’s parents during the Holocaust, first confined to a ghetto then deported to Nazi labor camps. The book depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats and moves back and forth from the Holocaust to the 1980s, when Art has difficulties relating to his traumatized father. It has been subjected to repeated attempts to ban it in schools.

Children’s Literature

These five books provide a sensitive and accurate introduction to the Holocaust for young readers.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr

This book, the first in Judith Kerr’s trilogy about World War II, is a fictionalized account of her own young life, and conveys the horror that the real-life Kerr and her family felt as Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and gained supporters. Kerr’s father was Jewish and her family fled to England before war broke out. Kerr later said she was moved to write this book after her own young son watched The Sound of Music and remarked “Now we know what it was like when mummy was a little girl!” The truth, Kerr wants readers to know, was far darker.

Hannah’s Suitcase by Karen Levine

This 2007 book tells the real-life story of a group of children in a Holocaust museum in Tokyo who in 2000 received an archive from the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum: a child’s empty suitcase with the words Hana Brady, May 16, 1931, Orphan written on it. This moving book describes the archive work performed by children at the museum in Tokyo, as well as the story of Hana Brady, whose fate these young Japanese schoolchildren discovered.

The Tattooed Torah by Marvell Ginsburg, illustrated by Martin Lemelman

For young children, this moving picture book tells the true story of a small Torah from the town of Brno in Czechoslovakia, which was just the right size for children to hold. After being desecrated during the Holocaust, the Torah was lovingly restored and is in use once more.

The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal

Another choice for younger children, this book tells the story of Yaffa Eliach, who grew up in the town of Ejszyszki (Eishyshok in Yiddish) in present-day Lithuania. Her town was a majority Jewish; during the Holocaust, 3,500 Jews from her town were murdered. After the holocaust, Eliach tracked down thousands of photographs from her hometown from all around the world. They now form a permanent collection called the Tower of Life in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

The Boy: A Holocaust Story by Dan Porat

This 2010 book takes an iconic photograph of a young boy, hands in the air, as a Nazi soldier aims his gun during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Porat traces the identity of several of the protagonists in this scene, including two Jews, the Nazi aiming his gun, and the Nazi photographer who recorded the ghetto’s destruction.