well, there is night, the zookeeper's wife (very good), milkweed, the diary of anne frank, the life and times of adolf hitler, and many more.

The Holocaust Kingdom
by Alexander Donat.

Its been a while since I read it, but I remember it was the first book about the Holocaust I had ever read.

The memoir of a middle class Polish-Jewish survivor's family. Written from the view point of a child's memory. Detailing life before the Nazi invasion and then life in the Warsaw ghetto.

I remember feeling my fingers grow cold as I held this book in my bed at night.

Another good children's/YA book is Mischling: Second Degree, by Ilse Kuhn. Loved this one growing up.

Man's Search for Meaning should be on everyones list of books to read about the holocaust. Although it sits in my "to-read" pile, what I know about it tells me enough. Their will be a review coming shortly after completion by yours truly.

Rachel, are you looking for children's and young adult books as well? If so, I have a bibliography of them that I'd be happy to send you. Many of the children's/YA books are based on true accounts by the parents, grandparents, or relatives of the authors, and sometimes on experiences of the authors themselves. I've read a lot of it myself. One I read recently that I can particularly recommend is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. Outstanding!

Yad Vashem is Israel's biggest holocaust museum and is a mini-collage for the study and documentation of the holocaust. Their books are highly thorough and there's a wide range of subjects, each focused on by some very good historians. Not all of them are easy to read stylishly because not all historians are also good writers...
The only problem is that I doubt there are many translations of these books from hebrew, the language they're written in...
Also, many Israeli printing companies have several good books but, again, I doubt you'd find english translations to them. Perhaps, with enough costumer pressure there'll be some printed...

A controversial book when originally published in Germany, The Nazi Census documents the origins of the census in modern Germany, along with the parallel development of machines that helped first collect data on Germans, then specifically on Jews and other minorities. Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth begin by examining the history of statistical technology in Germany, from the Hollerith machine in the 1890s through the development and licensing of IBM punch-card technology. Aly and Roth explain that census data was collected on non-Germans in order to satisfy the state's desire to track racial groups for alleged security reasons. Later this information led to disastrous results for those groups and others that were tracked in similar ways. Ultimately, as Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth point out in this short, rigorously researched book, the techniques the Nazis employed to track, gather information, and control populations initiated the modern system of citizen registration. Aly and Roth argue that what led to the devastating effects of the Nazi census was the ends to which they used their data, not their means. It is the employment of "normal" methods of collection that the authors examine historically as it applies to the Nazi regime, and also the way contemporary methods of classification and control still affect the modern world.

Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census. Identification and Control in the Third Reich. Temple University Press, 2004.

IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor. IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed. IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries -- all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction. Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit.
Only with IBM's technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany's war against the Jews -- how did Hitler get the names?

Edwin Black, IBM and The Holocaust. Crown, 2001.

I also toured the Holocaust museum and, before exiting the gift shop, I picked up a terrible and terrific account of the liberation of Dachau by the U.S. 7th army, entitled "Dachau Liberated: The Official Report". No holocaust delving can be complete without reading about the liberation experience, through the soldiers' eyes. After years of suffering and watching their commrades die in battle, upon entering those camps, they finally understood why they were there.

I read accounts of the Holocaust every once in awhile, and my favorite so far is Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. How someone who was slowly starving and living under the most abject conditions imaginable managed to pay such close attention to the foibles of his fellow inmates is beyond me. It's very much worth reading, and it's also a great introduction to a (sometimes literally) fantastic writer, whose fiction unrelated to the Holocaust is also worth looking into.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is not only her most accessible and a good book to read if you're not familiar with her; it's also devastating. Arendt set out to explore how it is possible for humans to commit acts of monumental moral blindness and then sleep at night. Her conclusions were controversial, here as well as in Origins of Totalitarianism, which illustrates the inception of Nazism and its ideology in vignettes and tighter brushstrokes than Eichmann. They are both worth reading, though Origins is very dense, very long, and contains much about the Soviets, Boers, and the Dreyfus Affair that may be of less interest if your focus is narrow.

Art Spiegelman's Maus might be the one I find the most moving, though. Anyone who's read it has probably gone through a couple copies, like I have, lending it to family and friends. Read it, read it, read it, I beg you.

Erin - Let me know what you think of Hansel and Gretel. I don't know too many people who have read it.

Peg - that book sounds very interesting! It just reserved it at my library!

I also recommend Night.

Also - Rena's Promise by Rena Kornreich Gelissen; I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Britton-Jackson

That is all I can think of off the top of my head ... I know I have read other amazing accounts - will have to check my shelf also :)

Erin

I just recently read "Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?" By Joseph Bau who was one of the Schindler list survivors. It was awesome.

"Schindler's List" of course is also good, as is "The Hiding Place" by Corrie Ten Boom.

I like these books because they were written by or about someone who was actually there. It is very powerful to hear the words of a holocaust survivor and to read not only what they went through, but how they dealt with it.

this reminds me of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America in which he fictionalizes what would have happened to America if Charles Limburgh (a nazi sympathizer) became president.

There are of course more serious books such as Norman Finklestein's who challenges the entire field of holocaust studies. It is critical to all of our survival to look at all of these views lest we be doomed to repeat the horrors of history again and again.

I enjoyed "The Painted Bird" and "Everything is Illuminated" as well.

I also thought that "The True Story of Hansel and Gretel" was a worthwhile read. The novel parallels the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel.It is about two young children who were left by their parents to hide in the woods in order to escape the Nazis. As in all fairy tales, the absence of parents leads to frightening discoveries and experiences as seen through the eyes of innocents.

Oh, I also just read "My Holocaust", which is a very dark humor look at a fictional family's Holocaust corporation. The corporation was begun by a married couple of Holocaust survivors, and continued by their son, and basically the solicit donations to defend the memory of the Holocaust, through monuments, lawsuits, etc. The conflict in the story involves other groups who want their genocides to be recognized and the defensiveness of the founder of the corporation towards this idea. The "Holocaust as universal" viewpoint is brought home to the characters by the granddaughter of the founder, who decides to become a Catholic nun because "Christians are today's Jews." This doesn't sound like it would be funny, but the author does an excellent job of pointing out people's hypocrisies on both sides of the issue.

These four aren't about the Holocaust per se, but all relate to it one way or another:

"Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer is a recent book that oddly combines humor and pathos. A young American sets off to explore his Russian roots, and the road trip is absurdly funny; in the process, he encounters the horrific story of the Nazi killings that occurred in his ancestral village.

"The Painted Bird," Jerzy Kosinski. It's been a long time since I read this, but it involves Jerzy as a young teen having to hide in the woods from the Nazis and survive on his wits.

"The Reawakening" by Primo Levi. This is part two of Levi's Holocaust memoir (I believe the first part recounts his concentration camp experiences in detail). This book actually picks up at the point where the camp was liberated but is grimly fascinating in its own right.

"The Fixer," by Bernard Malamud, is pre-Holocaust, but tells in detail the story of a Russian Jewish peasant who is caught up in a wave of anti-semitism because he dared to try to better his life and hide his Jewish identity. It is grim, but I found it gripping.

Rachel~
I went to the Holocaust museum and at the end they show people talking about their experience of the holocaust. This woman was telling her story and it was so amazing, I later found out that she wrote a book, it is one of the best books I have read and the ending is so wonderful.
The book is "All but my life" by Gerda Weissman Klein.
Also, someone recommend Night. by Elie Wiesel whom I just saw speak, it is a hard but wonderful book also.
Enjoy,
Tracey

I strongly suggest that with any literary venture that you include books dealing with the early history of zionism and post WWI. I have to dig into my library for titles, I don't have them at my fingertips right now.

The website "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust" has a great literature section here: http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/lit.h... It lists a ton of books on the holocaust, all nicely divided into categories.

Hi Rachel, I recommend taking a look at the following 4:

The Investigation, by Peter Weiss (note: it is written as a play)

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski

Night. by Elie Wiesel

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, by Simon Wiesenthal

Hey everyone, I am looking to read some good holocaust literature, whether it be fiction or non fiction. Does anyone know of some good books relating to this subject?