Staff Picks
Survivor Stories: The Holocaust in Memoir
- Sara M.
- Wednesday, January 09, 2019
Collection
The stories of Holocaust survivors give a personal perspective into the realities of the Shoah. These memoirs and fictional books based on real life experiences are powerful, immediate, and unforgettable.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf2019 reading challenge. Find more lists here.
The Seamstress a Memoir of Survival
Published in 2011
Growing up, Sara (Seren) Tuvel was the smartest, most ambitious girl in her Romanian mountain village. When she won and accepted a scholarship to a Gentiles-only Gymnasium, she was forced to make a decision that would change her path forever. At thirteen, faced with a teacher's anti-Semitism, Seren walked out of her classroom and into a new existence. She became the apprentice to a seamstress, and her skill with needle and thread enabled her again and again to patch the fraying pieces of her life. As the Nazis encircled the country and bombs rained down, Seren stitched her way to survival, scraping together enough money to provide for her family. When she, her younger sister Esther, and two friends were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, the four girls became one another's shelter. Told with the same old-fashioned narrative power as the novels of Herman Wouk, The Seamstress is the true story of Seren (Sara) Tuvel Bernstein and her survival during wartime. A story of tragedy told in raw, powerful language, it is also a dramatic tale of courage, intimate friendship, romance, and startling good fortune that will have listeners cheering.
The Diary of a Young Girl
The Definitive Edition
Published in 1996
A thirteen-year-old Dutch-Jewish girl records her impressions of the two years she and seven others spent hiding from the Nazis before they were discovered and taken to concentration camps. Includes entries previously omitted.
Somewhere There is Still a Sun
Published in 2015
When the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in 1941, twelve-year-old Michael and his family are deported from Prague to the Terezin concentration camp, where his mother's will and ingenuity keep them from being transported to Auschwitz and certain death.
Schindler's List
Published in 1993
A mature novel that is a fictionalized treatment of the life of the German industrialist who saved the lives of many Jews during World War II. Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Working with the actual testimony of Schindler's Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.
The Painted Bird
Published in 1995
"A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe."
Five Chimneys a Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz
Published in 2005
Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.
If I Should Die Before I Wake
Published in 1994
As Hilary, a Neo-Nazi initiate, lies in a coma, she is transported back to Poland at the onset of World War II into the life of a Jewish teenager.
In My Hands
Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
Published in 2016
Recounts the experiences of the author who, as a young Polish girl, hid and saved Jews during the Holocaust.
The Last Jew of Treblinka
A Survivor's Memory 1942-1943
Published in 2011
Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls; in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution. There was no pretense of work here like in Auschwitz or Birkenau, only a train platform and a road covered with sand. A road that led only to death. But not for the author, a young man who survived working as a "barber" and "dentist," heartsick with witnessing atrocity after atrocity. Yet he managed to survive so that somehow he could tell the world what he had seen. How he found the dress of his little sister abandoned in the woods. How he was forced to extract gold teeth from the corpses. How every night he had to cover the body pits with sand. How every morning the blood of thousands still rose to the surface. Many have courageously told their stories, and in the tradition of Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, the author provides the only survivors' record of Treblinka. Originally written in Yiddish in 1945 without hope or agenda other than to bear witness, this tale shows that sometimes the bravest and most painful act of all is to remember.
Test of Courage
Michel Thomas ; a Biography of the Holocaust Survivor and Nazi-hunter
Published in 2012
The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Until his death in 2005, he taught languages to ghetto kids, heads of industry and movie stars in a matter of days, succeeding even with people who considered themselves hopeless linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seemed to be a miracle worker with a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind. This unique understanding was gained under extreme circumstances. Stateless in Vichy France at the beginning of the Second World War, he was incarcerated and starved in a concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrenees. Forced into slave labour in a coal mine in Provence, he avoided being sent to Auschwitz by hiding within the confines of a deportation camp for six weeks.He escaped death to join the Secret Army of the Resistance. He was arrested and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyon, whom he deceived into releasing him, and was later re-arrested by the French Gestapo and tortured. He held out by entering a psychological state in which he no longer registered pain and after six hours of torture, his tormentors threw him into a cell and he survived to re-join the Resistance. After the Allies invaded France he joined the American forces, fought his way into Germany and was with the troops who liberated Dachau. He personally interrogated the camp's hangman and oversaw his handwritten confession. At the end of the war he became a Nazi-hunter. Working for American Counter Intelligence he posed as a Nazi himself to infiltrate and expose underground networks of SS men dedicated to the return of a Fourth Reich. In spite of the fact that his entire family had been murdered in Auschwitz, and many close friends killed in combat, at the very end of the war he staged an elaborate gala evening in Munich which he called a Reconciliation Concert. Using German musicians, and in defiance of strict Allied non-fraternisation laws, he brought friend and foe together in the belief that there had to be a different and better future. Author Christopher Robbins has dug deep to explore and substantiate the details of the Michel Thomas story. He has authenticated every episode through camp records, Vichy documents, Resistance papers, US Army reports and hundreds of hours of interviews with this extraordinary man. The result is one of the most inspirational stories of the 20th century.
A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
Published in 2015
A "memoir by a journalist about his father's attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden"--Dust jacket.
Maus
A Survivor's Tale, Vol. 01. My Father Bleeds History
Published in 1986
An autobiographical and biographical cartoon in which the author explores his strained relationship with his father, an Auschwitz survivor, while also relating the story of his parent's experiences as Jews in wartime Poland, as told to him by his dad during a series of conversations they had years later in New York and Vermont.
The Pianist
The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-45
Published in 1999
A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."
Helga's Diary
A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp
Published in 2013
Helga's Diary is a young girl's remarkable first-hand account of life in the Terezin concentration camp during World War II. The drawings and paintings that Helga made during her time in Terezin, which accompany this diary, were published in 1998 in the book Draw What You See (Zeichne, was Du siehst).