David Ryan's favorite compelling books about the Holocaust

I was taught by my author daughter that if I am to write a character-driven novel, I should write as the characters, not about them.

As I reflected on my daughter’s advice, I instantly recalled the power of de Rosnay’s portrayal of Sarah’s relationship with her baby brother. She manages to bare the soul of Sarah from her time as a ten-year-old to that of an adult who takes her own life, unable to cope with the consequences of a choice she makes in relation to her young brother.

De Rosnay leads me gently at first into the mind of a ten-year-old girl trying to save her brother from captivity by the Nazis. I could feel her initial desperation morphing into a sense of relief and even satisfaction at her decision to hide him in a secret closet from which he would soon be rescued (in her imagination).

Without even mentioning the key to any significant degree, I felt through Sarah’s need to possess and use it, her growing anxiety, fear, panic, and fatalism as the thoughts of her brother locked in a closet from which he could not escape began to obsess and haunt her. I was there when she eventually opened the closet with her key and was confronted with the sight of the shriveled-up body of Michael. Sarah’s inability to cope with what she had done, even in the name of love, was palpable right to the moment she took her own life.

This is a book that, on so many levels, is a testament to the lengths people are willing to go to, to protect those they love and the joy and relief, or heartache and despair, such behaviours can lead to. The backdrop of the terrors of occupied Europe makes this a book I highly recommend.

I first read Frankl’s book when I was studying psychology in my late 20s.

At the time, I was searching for some concept of self and had already grown tired of Skinner’s behaviorism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Piaget’s cognitive development theories, each of which told me more about the theorists themselves than provided insights into their concepts of self.

Frankl’s psychology is born out of his actual experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. I was struck by his observation that those who best survived were those who experienced/discovered/created a sense of purpose in what they did, whether this was caring for others less well off, enduring the harshest punishments with humility, finding satisfaction in the completion of the simplest of tasks, or even conversing with a loved one or an imaginary other. 

This is neither a theoretical treatise nor a fictional account of a serendipitous life. It is born in the harshness of the concentration camp, where Frankl found that survivors tended to be those who could imagine a future which would fuel their hope and optimism. The fact that he could develop his observations into a theory he called Logotherapy is testimony, for me, of his strength and of those other survivors whom he observed as his subjects.

When I visited Auschwitz-Birkenhau I was struck by the Australia plaque at the rear of the camp whose first three lines read, "Forever Let This Place Be; A Cry of Despair: And a Warning to Humanity."

Similarly, I was drawn to Wiese’s work when, in his preface to Night, he tells us he feels “he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human history.”

His is a brutal, first-hand account of the horrors and atrocities in Auschwitz. He appears to leave no stone unturned as he recounts the events from his admission to the camp, his life of survival juxtaposed with the protection of his father amidst the dehumanization of his fellow prisoners, to the eventual liberation, including the Death March, during which his father perished.

I was struck by his resilience in the face of overwhelming and unbearable grief, pain, fear, loss, and depravity, by his irrepressible and irresistible drive for survival, and the lengths he was prepared to go to for those he loved, especially his father, with whom he was imprisoned. The slow decline and eventual loss of faith tell a very human story, one which many of us may well have experienced should we have changed places.

This is not a book for the fainthearted, yet as confronting as it is, it leaves you with a sense of optimism that how we respond to any situation we encounter is our choice.

I visited the Anne Frank House.

I climbed the stairs to the annex. I passed by the bookcase that had hidden the family for just over 2 years. I sat on the beds, I stared at the pictures, I peered through the small window, but try as I could, I was unable to imagine the excruciating array of emotions that Anne and her family and friends must have experienced. 

In all my favourite, should this be a suitable descriptor, books about the Holocaust, I am drawn to stories of hope and optimism against the odds, and of the harsh realities of the lengths we can, must, and will go to, to both protect those we love and/or to try to secure our own survival.

For me, there is no better account of these characteristics than Anne Frank’s descriptions of life in the attic at Prinsengracht 263-267, 1016 GV Amsterdam. Rather ironically, she wrote in her diary on her 13th birthday, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

The irony of her life, and subsequent death, is that those same drivers for survival she was experiencing are what caused her location to be revealed to the Nazis by neighbours. With hope can come despair.

I particularly appreciated the fact that, like Sarah’s Key, this book is a work of historical fiction based on an exquisite amount of detailed research.

It shares in common with the other four the horrors of internment, the effects these have on our behaviours, and the ends to which we are prepared to go, in the case of Sage and Josef, to relieve the shame and guilt of someone to whom we have developed a strong attachment.

I found the unfolding of the events related by Minka of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz interwoven with revelations of Josef’s role in the SS to be compelling. The way the horrors of the past can be seen as ghosts in people’s lives decades later is, for me, testimony to the way the past shapes who we become and why we act the way we do.

Unlike the other books, there are creative writing aspects which I really enjoyed. The story is told through the narrative of each of the main characters, whose voices are, apart from anything else, represented in different fonts. I found the backwards and forwards storytelling between Auschwitz and modern-day America caused me to question not only the motives and behaviours of the characters themselves, but my own assumptions about how I might have behaved faced with similar circumstances.

The Shakespearean twist at the end between Sage and Josef, like Romeo and Juliet, is testimony to the fact that our well-intentioned actions can oftentimes lead to unwanted and unexpected outcomes, and for this novel, a fitting ending for what is a deep and dark story.