Good books about the Holocaust, including both fiction and nonfiction

YOU ARE READING: Good books about the Holocaust, including both fiction and nonfiction AT PhebinhvanhocEN

Here are 20 good books about the Holocaust plus four others that help explain how the Holocaust came about and proceeded without meaningful opposition for so long. They include both fiction and nonfiction. Within each of the two categories below I’ve listed the books in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.

This post was updated on August 3, 2022.

You are reading: Best holocaust books fiction

good books about the holocaust

anatomy of a genocide: the life and death of a people named buczacz by omer bartov—the holocaust under the microscope of history

Tracing the history of anti-Semitism in a single Polish-Ukrainian city from the 16th century to the present, and detailing day by day how the Holocaust unfolded there, brings to light the many nuances lost in historical portraits painted with a broader vision. brush. read the review.

the school that escaped the nazis: the true story of the school teacher who defied hitler by deborah cadbury—the holocaust seen through the eyes of children

amazon lists 4,000 books on the holocaust. Half of it is non-fiction, like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor E’s Man’s Search for Meaning. frankl. the rest include such successful novels as The Book Thief and The Auschwitz Tattoo Artist. Of course, some of the countless memoirs and novels tell the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of children. But I have never come across a book that tells the story more poignantly from her perspective than Deborah Cadbury’s School Escape from the Nazis. read the review.

the german girl by armando lucas Correa—a deeply moving novel about the holocaust

In this poignant Holocaust story loosely based on historical fact, the “German girl” is Hannah Rosenthal, the blonde, blue-eyed, 11-year-old daughter of a wealthy and prominent Jewish family in Berlin that is “more German.” than their non-Jewish neighbors. Read the review.

The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in the Middleby Michael Dobbs: Did Fdr Betray the Jews of Europe?

a persuasive argument that president franklin roosevelt did everything he could to help save german jewish refugees—that, in fact, the united states admitted more of them than any other country with the sole exception of the territory of Palestine. read the review.

martin fletcher’s list: a suspenseful story of holocaust survivors in post-war london

This story of a young Jewish family sheltering in London in 1945 drives home the chilling reality of the Holocaust more forcefully than any recitation of Hitler’s casualty figures. read the review.

man’s search for meaning by viktor e. frankl—from the ashes of the holocaust, a gift of lessons for living

Over the course of more than three years in a succession of four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, a young Viennese psychiatrist comes to the conclusion that “life is not primarily a pursuit of pleasure, as Freud believed, or a search for power, as alfred adler taught, but a search for meaning”. read the review.

the last jews in berlin by leonard gross—these jews survived the holocaust. . . in berlin

when we consider the fate of the jews in europe during the nazi years, our thoughts tend to drift towards stereotyped images. the gas chambers at auschwitz and other extermination camps. and the damned anne frank locked in hiding for two years until she was betrayed. both images are accurate as they reflect the experience of millions of European Jews. But there were exceptions, and their experiences tell us a lot about life in Nazi-dominated Europe. Author Leonard Gross does an excellent job of conveying the alternate reality they represented in the Last Jews in Berlin. if true. Jews survived the holocaust in berlin. read the review.

the secrets of the notebook: a woman’s quest to discover the secret of her royal family by eve haas: a woman’s obsessive search to learn how her grandmother died in the holocaust

Eve Jaretzki was 16 when she learned she was the great-great-granddaughter of Prince Augustus of Prussia, the fabulously wealthy warrior prince who had defeated Napoleon. It was 1940. Six years earlier, her parents had fled Nazi Germany and moved with the family to Hampstead, near London. they were Jews. So how could Eve and her father be direct descendants of Prussian royalty, a family notorious for its anti-Semitism? read the review.

the last kings of shanghai: the rival jewish dynasties that helped create modern china by jonathan kaufman, the foreign businessmen who helped build modern china

Since the end of World War II eight decades ago, stories have surfaced of heroic men and women who saved Jews from certain death in the holocaust at great risk to their own lives. Names like Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200, and Raoul Wallenberg, who saved several thousand, regularly appear in the pages of history. in fact, yad vashem, israel’s holocaust museum, recognizes more than 26,000 “individuals and groups from 44 countries” as righteous among the nations for similar acts. In Shanghai, two businessmen who helped build modern porcelain deserve equal mention. read the review.

odessa: genius and death in a city of dreams by charles king: the roots of antisemitism lie deep in the russian empire

the great port of odessa, in the south of ukraine, was the site of the first and largest pogroms of the russian empire in its history. But it was the Romanians, not the Germans or the Russians, who eradicated the city’s Jewish population during the holocaust. . . read the review.

simon mawer’s glass room: a brilliant novel exploring life in nazi europe

This haunting historical novel focuses on the experiences of the Czech-Jewish Landauer family, their servants and friends from 1938, when the Nazis seized power in Prague, until the end of World War II in 1945. Read review .

the auschwitz tattoo artist by heather morris—holocaust memories: a deeply moving love story set in auschwitz

A fictionalized treatment of the true story of a young Slovakian Jew who survived three years in Auschwitz and saved several lives of his fellow inmates, including the woman he later married. read the review.

from krakow to berkeley: coming out of hiding by anna rabkin—“survival is sweet revenge”: the odyssey of a holocaust survivor

A daughter of a Polish-Jewish family born in 1935 reflects on her life as a child in hiding from the Nazis and the seven decades that followed in an eventful life that spanned three continents. read the review.

chil rajchman’s last jew of treblinka: poignant memoirs of a death camp survivor

Here is an extraordinary insider account of the notorious Treblinka death camp at its height in 1942-43, written by a young man who was one of hundreds who rebelled and fled. (the camp was closed as a result). read the review.

alex rosenberg’s girl from krakow: world war ii from a polish perspective

A novelist examines the impact of the Second World War from the perspective of a young woman and a young man, both Jews born in Poland after the First World War. The story spans the late 1930s through the early post-war years when the Russians and their Western allies divvied up the spoils of the continent. read the review.

survivor café: the legacy of trauma and the labyrinth of memory by elizabeth rosner: the holocaust, mass trauma, inherited post-traumatic stress disorder, and genetics

A novelist and poet set out to understand the impact of her parents’ World War II experiences on her own life and found herself exploring the controversial phenomenon of epigenetics, “the study of environmentally induced changes that are passed down from generation to generation.” next.” read the review.

jim shepherd’s book of aron: a brilliant novel from the warsaw ghetto

In 1942, in the months before the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the thirteen-year-old son of a poor Jewish couple from a Polish shtetl is forced to go to extreme measures to survive as the Nazis progressively reduce the borders of the ghetto. and starve its residents. read the review.

mila 18 by leon uris: a classic novel about the warsaw ghetto uprising

Published in 1961, when memories of World War II were still vivid, this novel by one of America’s most popular authors dramatizes the experience of Jews forced into the Warsaw ghetto and their heroic resistance to the end. read the review.

1944: fdr and the year that changed history by jay winik: the sad story of fdr’s complicity with the holocaust

a historian reveals how “the state department was now using the machinery of government to prevent, rather than facilitate, the rescue of the Jews” from the holocaust. read the review.

war and remembrance (world war ii #2 of 2) by herman wouk: two world war ii novels brilliantly convey the scope of the conflict

In the second of his two monumental World War II novels, Wouk devotes large sections to the experiences of the Jastrow family as they encounter the Holocaust. The main characters are two Americans, Natalie and her famous uncle Aaron Jastrow, and Aaron’s Polish Jewish cousin, Berel Jastrow. americans live the holocaust on the western front, berel in the east.

good books that help explain how the holocaust happened

an officer and a spy by robert harris: the dreyfus affair, recreated in a suspenseful spy novel

Robert Harris’s gripping fictional treatment of the Dreyfus Affair helps illustrate how deeply entrenched anti-Semitism was in Europe long before Adolf Hitler came to power. This tragic episode lasted more than a dozen years in the early 20th century and took place in France, not Germany. in fact, antisemitism was widespread across the continent and had been raging violently for more than a thousand years before the second world war. read the review.

joseph kanon’s accomplice—hunting nazis in argentina

On May 11, 1960, the Mossad captured SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Eichmann had been one of the main planners behind the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Later, in Israel, he was convicted of war crimes in a widely publicized trial and executed by hanging in 1962. Meanwhile, other notorious Nazi war criminals, including Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie, were the subject of intensive searches elsewhere. parts of South America. And thriller author Joseph Kanon writes about a similar effort, the Nazi hunt in Argentina, in a brilliant new novel, El Accomplice. read the review.

in the garden of beasts: love, terror, and an american family in hitler’s berlin by erik larson—why the united states didn’t speak out against the rise of hitler’s germany

Few Americans understand the extent to which our fellow Americans collaborated with the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and not just Charles Lindbergh, Father Coslin, and the America First movement they championed. Erik Larson’s best-selling book recounts how the United States ambassador to Berlin in the 1930s was thwarted and ultimately remembered because of his efforts to speak out against the increasingly violent crackdown on German Jewry by of hitler. Many of his superiors in the US State Department were virulent anti-Semites, and FDR did not control them. read the review.

pogrom: kishinev and the tilt of history by steven j. zipperstein: in a prelude to the holocaust, the kishinev pogrom shocked the world

Before the holocaust, Jews died by the thousands in pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although it was a small-scale event compared to other massacres that took place both before and after, the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was by far the best known because it received a lot of press attention. During the decades leading up to the Holocaust, and for decades afterward in Israel, Kishinev remained a symbol of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Europe. read the review.

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