Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Night (1960)Night (1960)Published Jan 1, 1960The place most readers begin, and it earns that. Elie Wiesel was 15 when he was deported to Auschwitz, and his account of a son trying to keep his failing father alive through Auschwitz and Buchenwald stays with readers for life. The 1960 English edition ran to just 116 pages: one sitting, though…0
  2. 2Diary of a Young Girl. (1947)Diary of a Young Girl. (1947)Published Jan 1, 1947Most 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…0
  3. 3The Complete MausThe Complete MausArt Spiegelman's account of his father Vladek's survival, drawn with Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs, won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first for a graphic novel. It is nonfiction in comics form: Vladek's testimony runs alongside the prickly relationship between father and…0
  4. 4All but my life (1957)All but my life (1957) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1957A survivor's memoir with a full arc, from a family home in Poland through slave labor camps to liberation. Near the end of the war Gerda Weissmann survived a death march that lasted months, on which her closest friend died in her arms. Among the American troops who freed her in Volary,…0
  5. 5The Holocaust (2017)The Holocaust (2017)Published Jan 1, 2017Laurence Rees's The Holocaust: A New History is a clear single-volume telling of the whole story, from the roots of Nazi antisemitism to the end of the war. Rees spent about 25 years meeting survivors and perpetrators for his television documentaries, and much of that testimony had never been…0
  6. 6The Escape Artist (2024)The Escape Artist (2024)Published Jan 1, 2024In April 1944, three weeks after German forces invaded Hungary, nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler were among the first Jewish prisoners to escape Auschwitz and report on it. Weeks later, Hungary's Jews were being sent to Auschwitz at a rate of 12,000 a day, and the…0
  7. 7Ordinary Men (1992)Ordinary Men (1992) 8.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1992The book that best answers the question readers ask after their first memoir: how did ordinary people become mass murderers? Christopher Browning studied Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 German Order Police who shot and rounded up Jews in occupied Poland in 1942, including in the…0
  8. 8Bloodlands (2010)Bloodlands (2010) 8.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 2010Timothy Snyder widens the frame to the lands between Berlin and Moscow, today's Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states, where the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945. The murder of Europe's Jews sits here beside the 1933 famine in…0
  9. 9Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) 8.8/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1963Hannah Arendt reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, and this 1963 book gave the world the phrase "the banality of evil." She did not mean that his actions were ordinary; she meant that the man in the dock seemed driven less by fanatical hatred than by complacency. Read it as…0
  10. 10Into that darkness (1974)Into that darkness (1974) 10.0/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1974Gitta Sereny spent 70 hours interviewing Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps, in prison, and he died of a heart attack nineteen hours after she finished. The book is as close as a reader can come to the mind of a man who ran a death camp, and her questioning…0