Holocaust Books, Websites, and Movies

BOOKS

Bachrach, Susan D. Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. 109 pp. This book tells the stories of eight people who were children or teens when the Holocaust began and uses their experiences to illustrate the horror of it. This work was created in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.


Bernstein, Sara Tuvel. The Seamstress. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997. 353 pp. Published after the author’s death, it is one of the most moving accounts that I have ever read from a survivor. The author was a teen when she started to make her way in Romania as a seamstress. The rise of Fascism in her country and the resulting anti-Semitic laws eventually landed her in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Only one woman of every twenty sent there survived the camp. When you read her story you will see why she was one of the survivors.


Greenfeld, Howard. After the Holocaust. New York: Greenwillow Books, 2001. 146pp. For the Jews that survived the Holocaust, the end of the war was often a continuation of their nightmare. The survivors were often put into displaced persons camps with the very people who wanted to kill them. The story of this period in history is told partly through the eyes of eight young people.


Grossman, Mendel. My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto. San Diego: Gulliver Books, 2000. Unpaged. Mendel Grossman took photographs of the Lodz Ghetto by concealing a camera in his raincoat. He worked in the photographic laboratory of the ghetto administration and thus had access to a darkroom. Much of his work was saved by friends who thought his work was an important record. Grossman himself died on a forced march.


Levine, Ellen. Darkness over Denmark: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews. New York: Holiday House, 2000. 164 pp. This is the remarkable story of the rescue of nearly eight thousand Danish Jews in 1943. Twenty-one people were interviewed, some of whom were two years old at the time. This book raises the uncomfortable question: If the Danes did it, why couldn’t other countries?


Lobel, Anita. No Pretty Pictures. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1998. 193 pp.
 It is hard to reconcile the art of Anita Lobel with her horrific childhood. From the ages of five to ten she was either hiding from the Nazis or surviving their camps. Her attention to detail has helped her in the visual arts, and here helps her illustrate with words the pain and suffering she endured.


Rogasky, Barbara. Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust. New York: Holiday House, 1988, 2002. 187 pp. This is a new revised and expanded edition that was published in 2002. New information has been added to an already informative book. Answers to revisionists who deny that the Holocaust ever happened are neatly answered here.

Rozett, Robert and Shmuel Spector. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Facts on File, 2000. 528 pp. This is a great reference book about this subject. The articles are not always long, but are very enlightening. This in an excellent volume to use if you are just beginning a research paper on this subject.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Prentice Hall, 1993) is the diary of a young Jewish girl who  spends her teenage years in hiding from the Germans during the Holocaust.     

Night by Elie Wiesel (Bantam Books, 1982), although claiming to be fictional, is an autobiographical account of Wiesel's  experiences in Birkenau, Aushweitz, and Buchenwald. The main character in the story is a proud and pious teenager, who  is racked with guilt and confusion over being the only person in his family to survive the Holocaust.   
 
 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon  Books, 1992) is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel written in comic-book form. Depicting the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice creates the idea of the Jews being trapped. The story is a memoir of the author's father and his experiences during the Holocaust.

Wartime Lies by Louis Begley (Ballantine/Ivy Books, 1992) is an absorbing story of Machieh, a 9-year-old boy who  survives the Nazi occupation of Poland by posing as a non-Jew. The story focuses on the psychological price he is forced  to pay for surviving while so many others like himself perished.     

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank by Willy Lindwer (Random House/Anchor, 1992) relates the stories of six  women who knew Anne Frank during the last seven months of her life. The story gives a first-hand account of life in the  concentration camps.    

 Hide and Seek by Ida Vos (Houghton Mifflin Co, 1991) focuses on an 8-year-old girl from Holland who is initially angry  at the German occupation for restricting her from going to school and playing with her friends. She is then separated from  her parents and forced into hiding. Five years later she is freed and reunited with most of her family. Grateful to be alive,  she nonetheless asks the question, "How did a childhood game of hide-and-seek become a game of survival?"    

 On the Other Side of the Gate: A Novel by Yuri Suhl (Franklin Watts, 1975) focuses on the question of denying one's  own ancestry. During the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hershel and Lena allow a Polish Catholic acquaintance to adopt their  infant son to save him from persecution. The fate of Hershel and Lena is unclear. Rather, the conclusion focuses on the  pain many Jewish families faced after the war by their own children's rejection of them. The children, having lived most of  their lives as non-Jews, cannot come to terms with their true heritage.     

The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender and Jim Coon (Pocket Books, 1997) recounts in the first-person narrative Riva Minka’s  tales of suffering first under the Nazi regime in Poland and later in the concentration camps. It is the tale of a young girl  with the soul of a poet who shows strength, courage, and determination in the face of death.    

 I Have Lived A Thousand Years: Growing Up In The Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson (Simon and Schuster Books  for Young Readers, 1997) is a memoir of a 13-year-old Hungarian girl who recalls her experiences of the Holocaust. A very  powerful book that details the round-ups, torture, forced-labor, shootings, and liberation from the viewpoint of a teenager  struggling to survive.   

 Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps by Andrea Warren (HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001) is the  harrowing retelling of Jack Mandelbaum’s Holocaust experience. At age 12, Jack is separated from his family and sent to  Blechhammer, a Nazi concentration camp. The author uses the boy’s words and voice to tell this tragic story.

Number the Stars By Lois Lowry
Published 1989   137pages Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think about life before the war. But it's now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching in their town. The Nazi won't stop. The Jews of Denmark are being "relocated, " so Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family. Then Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission. Somehow she must find the strength and courage to save her best friend's life. There's no turning back now.

Daniel Half Human by David Chotjewitz  At the dawn of Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 two boys swear eternal brotherhood by slitting their wrists and mingling their blood. Having experienced so much together, even a night in jail after painting a swastika on a wall, Daniel and Armin had become the best of friends.
But then, Daniel receives some life-altering news: He is half-Jewish, and as such, half-hated by a growing number of neighbors, teachers, and friends. Quickly, he decides to keep his identity a secret, conspiring with Armin to join the Hitler Youth -- but only one of them can, and will, join, with terrible consequences.

Web Sites  
Remember.org
 http://www.remember.org/
 This site is dedicated to the eleven million victims of the Holocaust. Click on the witnesses section and you will find a pamphlet produced by the United States Army concerning the liberation of the Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp. The people who write about what they found are clearly sympathetic to the prisoners and disgusted by what they find.


The History Place: Holocaust Timeline
 http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html
 This site highlights various important dates in Holocaust history. Underlined annotations include photos and comments.


The Holocaust/Shoah Page
 http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/holo.html
 If you wonder why the Holocaust is considered unique in human history, this site explains three reasons why. Also included is the famous quote by Martin Niemoller. It is a part of the Holocaust Ring which allows you to go to many different sites concerning the Holocaust in quick succession.


The Simon Wiesenthal Center
 http://www.wiesenthal.com/
 This site keeps track of anti-Semitic issues in the world today while still keeping Holocaust issues in mind. Simon Wiesenthal is a Nazi hunter who was instrumental in the arrest of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann.


A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust
 http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/Website.htm
 This extensive group of links includes General Sources, Resistors, Survivors, Photographs and more. I would recommend that this be one of the first sites you visit.


The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
 http://www.ushmm.org/
 Includes an introduction to the Holocaust as well as personal histories. Animated maps of various events (i.e., rescues) and places (i.e., ghettos) are very enlightening.


Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority
 http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/index.html
 Yad Vashem has a mission of perpetuating the legacy of the Holocaust so that the world will not forget the cruelty and destruction of that time. In addition, they honor the non-Jews who risked their lives to help the Jews during the Holocaust. There is a listing of the number of people from each country who helped saved the Jews, available by clicking the Righteous Among the Nations ink



MOVIES

Schindler’s List

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Pianist

Swing Kids

Life is Beautiful

Paper Clips: This is a documentary about school children who wanted to understand the full impact of the number 6 million. They collected 6 million paper clips by sending letters out to people and asking them to send paper clips back in rememberance of people who died in the Holocaust. It is an amazing story and helps students feel like there is something they can do to ensure that an atrocity like the Holocaust will never happen again.

Band of Brothers: This is a bit of a combination of a documentary and a movie. It is about 7 DVDs that tell the story of a group of American soldiers during WWII.