Diary of a Young Girl. (1947)

Most readers meet the Holocaust through one voice before they meet the numbers, and this is the voice. Anne Frank began writing on June 14, 1942, soon after her 13th birthday, and kept going in the sealed-off annex behind her father's Amsterdam business until August 1, 1944, three days before the family's arrest. What lifts it beyond a historical document is the writer it reveals: funny, self-critical, impatient with the adults around her and set on becoming an author. Look for the Definitive Edition, a newer translation that includes material Otto Frank left out of the 1947 Dutch first edition. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen at 15, and the diary's silence after its last entry is part of what it teaches.