Books like Night — picked by fans

Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was sent to Auschwitz by the German Nazis because he was Jewish.

While in the camp, Frankl noticed that individual prisoners responded in totally different ways to the same appalling circumstances: some stole food from others, some hoarded their food, and some shared their food with others. He concludes that human freedom is ineradicable. He also learned from his camp experience that people want meaning in life as much as they want food or water. Human beings do not live for pleasure, but for the discovery of meaning.

I loved this very inspiring and compelling book about how some people, like Frankl, can rise above the most horrendous suffering.

I loved this book because it captures childhood in the rawest way—messy, painful, confusing, and resilient.

Walls writes about instability and survival with such clarity that I found myself nodding through entire chapters. I related deeply to the burden of growing up too fast and learning how to take care of people before you ever learned how to take care of yourself.

What moved me most was the love within the chaos—the complicated, contradictory love between parent and child that shapes you long after you’ve grown. It reminded me that you can carry pain and tenderness at the same time, and both can be true.

What stays with me is not the survival story, but the change that followed.

Louie’s struggle with anger and pain after the war felt familiar. This story shows that endurance by itself is not enough. Freedom comes through forgiveness and faith.

The movement from anger to grace stood out to me. It made me consider that even when hard experiences influence us, they do not have to decide our future.

I loved this non-fiction book, and reading it, I often broke down in tears, realizing this personal and innocent true teenage story was all leading up to the tremendous death of millions of innocent people.

This is the only Anne Frank book that I recommend to everybody from a young age. It is THE introduction to the real events of World War 2.

Frankl, de Tocqueville, Love, and Tocquigny focus on affirmative action, success, meaning, and purpose, and Arendt provides a sobering reflection on the alternative. After observing the greatest horror the world has produced, she concludes much of the wickedness in the world is created by people in the neutral zone, people with no allegiance to good or evil, people who “just let it happen.”

What happens when we don’t choose but are content to let others choose for us when we deny our “response-ability.”  Who is responsible when no one is responsible?

“I ask for freedom for my book.” This was the plea the Ukrainian-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vassily Grossman sent to Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the manuscript of his novel, Life and Fate, was confiscated by the KGB.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (in the tradition of Tolstoy) follows an enormous cast of soldiers, scientists, prisoners, bureaucrats, mothers, and children whose lives intersect as Grossman moves seamlessly from freezing trenches and shattered apartment blocks to extermination camps, interrogation rooms, and laboratories haunted by political fear.

What made the book unforgivable to Soviet censors was Grossman’s daring choice to portray Stalinism and Nazism not as ideological opposites, but as terrifying reflections of one another. Both are regimes built upon fear, conformity, and the crushing of individual freedom. Few books convey so powerfully both the scale of historical horror and the stubborn endurance of human dignity.

Life… show more.

Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust have now died, which makes it more important than ever that we pass on knowledge about this incomparably brutal crime against humanity – and do our best to prevent future genocides.

Survival in Auschwitz is a highly detailed, profoundly disturbing, and, in the end, intensely moving account of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s eleven months in the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz.

If you wish to understand what the Holocaust meant to its victims – and how the prisoners did their heroic best to resist dehumanization, hopelessness, and death – you would do well to start with this important work.  

Haing Ngor, is still only one of three Asian actors to win an Oscar, received in 1985 for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of journalist Dith Pran for the film, The Killing Fields. Remarkably Haing Ngor himself was a survivor of the genocide in Cambodia, a trained Doctor at the time before the Khmer Rouge enacted their devastating atrocities upon the country. He would only survive torture by pretending to be an uneducated taxi driver. This book will leave you in awe and inspired, as it did for me, of Haing Ngor’s life. He resettles in America, doing jobs cleaning latrines to suddenly finding himself becoming Hollywood famous overnight. He was an important voice in the advocacy of human rights, until he, unfortunately, passed away in 1996.

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

A child survivor of the Holocaust, Durlacher long believed that he was the only person still alive from a group of 89 boys assigned to the Birkenau extermination camp in 1944. After he learned that he was wrong, he set himself the task of confronting his past by locating some of the others. As in many other Holocaust memoirs, the prose here is spare, and the lack of detail can be a little confusing. For example, the reader is thrown into the author's search without a description of the process that led him to take his journey. But some psychological truisms emerge in this gray travelogue that, while not fresh, are worth ruminating over. What the author, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who died in 1996, finds is that even though the survivors shared a common experience, how they have coped with their wartime suffering differs.… show more.