The Holocaust Books

'Nobody knows how much I owe that man', Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. 'I could never repay him'. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate...

‘Lucid and damning … an absorbing – and infuriating – tale of complicity, coverup and denial’ PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of EMPIRE OF PAINA groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third...

‘Among the most moving documents I have read in years … You will not forget it’ Elie Wiesel From her small, sunny hometown between the beautiful Carpathian Mountains and the blue Danube River, Elli Friedmann was taken – at a time when most girls are...

Harry Peters - formerly Hermann Ludwig Pollnow, known to his family as Mutzi - was born in Berlin in 1920. As a teenager, he fled Nazi Germany and landed in rural Australia. Harry's parents, Max and Edith, stayed and perished in Nazi camps.This story, of...

In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Gwrych Castle was familiar to the British public as the setting of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! Lesser known is that, at the beginning of the Second World War, this once-grand country house...

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family," a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project, My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning...

"Extraordinary storytelling about unfathomable horror."-Library Journal(starred review)"[A] worthy tribute to the extraordinary bravery of a remarkable woman."-Publishers WeeklyIn World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husbandWacek...

Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes is a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up-from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and...

When the Holocaust broke out in Europe, Hansi and Joel Brand were joined by Israel (Rezs) Kasztner to launch an organized effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts, which involved playing a dangerous bluffing game against the Nazi regime,...

How does a secular, non-practising Jew who has lived most of her life outside the Jewish communitysuddenly find herself in the front rows of a Nazi war crimes tribunal?In 2015, the award-winning writer Judith Kalman was invited to Lneburg to testify at...

The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation. For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

This book explores the similar attitudes and methods behind modern society's treatment of animals and the way humans have often treated each other, most notably during the Holocaust. The book's epigraph and title are from "The Letter Writer," a story by...

From Spain to Syria, the thrilling, untold history of Nazi fugitives turned postwar agents for America, the Soviets, the Third World, or themselves.After the Second World War, the Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals 'to the ends of the...

"Enthralling ... A great read."-Philippe de Montebello, former director, Metropolitan Museum of ArtOctober 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city's Jewish population the next...

To build up a future, you have to know the past.' Otto Frank, 1967 In late 1940s Amsterdam, when Otto Frank unwrapped his daughter Anne's diary with trembling hands and began to read the first pages, he discovered a side to his daughter...

April 7, 1944 - This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over one hundred miles to be the...

A story of justice through the ages . . . and revenge. Germany, 1945. The bloodiest war in history is at an end. Now the retribution and search for justice begins. In a series of Nuremberg trials, war criminals are hanged or commit suicide. Others are...

"The photographs and stories in Beyond the Shadows are not just a reminder of how racism and anti-Semitism can foment violence and murder, but a warning for our uneasy present, when white nationalism and neo-Nazism are on the upswing. These stories are...

An intimate portrait of an extended Jewish family in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, who, when faced with imminent deportation and death, refused to comply.As the Nazis tightened their grip on the Netherlands' Jewish population, Daphne Geismar's family...

An intimate co-creation of three graphic novelists and four Holocaust survivors, But I Live consists of three illustrated stories based on the experiences of each survivor during and after the Holocaust.David Schaffer and his family survived in Romania...

With a foreword by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel! Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief...

Heda Margolius Kovly (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence;...

Subject of The New York Times documentary "The Forger," winner of a World Press Photo Award and an Emmy AwardAs seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper"[An] engrossing literary debut. ... Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor...

Upon its premiere, The Deputy stirred up more controversy and caused greater repercussions than any other postwar work. Based on Rolf Hochhuth's research into the Vatican activities during World War II, the play's treatment of Pope Pius XII - the...

Forgotten Holocaust has become a classic of World War II literature. As Norman Davies noted, "Dr. Richard Lukas has rendered a valuable service, by showing that no one can properly analyze the fate of one ethnic community in occupied Poland without...

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics. 'Darkness and Company' is an unflinching and morally complex historical novel about a Lithuanian photographer who agrees to record the murderous actions of the occupying SS and local militia in return for the...

A major new history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice.Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and...

On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children-all but seven of the town's Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan Gross reveals how...

How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violence Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted...

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In...

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975,...

Giants is a moving and inspirational story of survival, of a troupe of seven dwarf siblings, whose story starts like a fairy tale, before moving into the darkest moments of their history; the darkest moments of modern history. At a time when the phrase...