Books like The Holocaust Kid — picked by fans

This novel took much of America by storm, and I am no different.

I love the voice of Demon Copperhead, which bleeds from the Appalachian Mountains. He has endured more trauma over his early years than most people do in several lifetimes. I think what’s most endearing about this novel is that it is sadly believable. Demon is a boy whose local environment has doomed him before he took his first breath. He’s the kind of boy who is just hoping for a break, and as the reader, all I wanted to do was adopt him and give him a good home.

And of course, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that probably means something!

This book has a premise that resonates with me, rooted in my belief that at birth, we are handed a suitcase that someone else packed.

A haunting, heartbreaking drama, the novel follows a mysterious WWII mail-order bride who assumes a dead woman's identity to immigrate to Canada. After she gives birth, she abandons her daughter, leaving behind only a diary.

When I came across Richler’s novel, I was stunned to find echoes of my own novel’s plot. Richler’s daughter—in search of her missing mother—is an achingly poignant reminder of the power exerted by buried family secrets and mother-daughter bonds gone awry, a theme that will always draw me in. 

I was drawn into this novel, easily relating to the protagonists who, at the core of this story, suffer from a crisis of identity. It arises from feeling uncomfortable in your own skin because you don’t know where—or who—you come from. 

I related to the immigrant experience, to being the other, a displaced person, and to the conflicting desires: wanting to blend in while maintaining an individualistic identity. 

It is compelling how Correa’s novel spans the difficult history of the 20th century as recounted through the stories of three generations of women. What absorbed me most was the lengths to which the mothers in the novel go to protect their daughters, but how family secrets invariably play out to create a cascade of consequences.

I love this book because, long ago, it was one of the books that sparked my initial interest in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Through Wouk’s vivid and wonderful story of a fictional family living through the period, he also unexpectedly provided me with a terrific foundation of well-researched historical knowledge.

I had read the prequel a few years earlier and when I discovered this book was coming out (as a poor student, I couldn’t afford it), I eagerly asked for it for Christmas. When the big day arrived, I gleefully tore open the present and spent the next two days reading it nonstop, ignoring all else.

The Holocaust is not solely the domain of historians or survivors. Lawrence Langer, a distinguished literary scholar, has shown us how much a study of Holocaust literature can contribute to our understanding. His work Art from the Ashes is an incomparable anthology, one that will need to be updated for the years since it was published as literary creativity is flourishing with regard to the Holocaust.

I can’t understand why this book isn’t better known. It is an actual diary that survived by chance. It was written by a young woman of twenty-one from a wealthy Jewish family long-established in France and not thinking of themselves as anything but French. I found it gripping and harrowing, all the more so because when the Nazis conquer France and start to impose restrictions on Jews, Hélène cannot grasp what is happening or what lies ahead. She has had a happy, secure life, but now these hideous indignities are being imposed on her.

When she is forced to wear the yellow star, she is horrified by the jeers and insults directed at her in the streets by passers-by whom she has always thought of as fellow citizens. The diary brings home, like almost nothing else I’ve read, the way in which the ordinary life of the intended victims turned… show more.

Where Gitta Sereny talks with people involved in Nazi atrocities, Ernst Klee presents documentary evidence of these crimes. No one has published better or more important compendia of documents on Nazi crimes than Klee. I discovered his books as an exchange student in Germany (1988-89) and quickly found them to be unique. Klee’s spare method is to portray the Nazis’ descent into evil through the medium of their own texts and photographs. Regrettably, few of his books have been translated into English. The one I’m recommending here is a fine introduction to his style of historical writing.  

Klee’s evidence shows the awful arc drawn by Nazi crimes, from German incitement of pogroms against Jews in the east and Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men, women, and children to the development of stationary gassing installations in death camps. Klee has a point of view, but he doesn’t want to convince you with… show more.

In this amazingly inventive novel, Rotkowitz creates a world in which a young woman with everything to live for is haunted by imaginary demons – demons that stand for the horrible experiences her family endured during the time of the Holocaust, and which she must exorcise if she is ever to find true happiness in the true world of the living.

I am recommending this book because it is a thorough investigation into the Nazi Eastern policies and their effects in the East. And also because Dr. Reitlinger was a renowned scholar.

I personally loved this book because, even though the topic is serious as it is sad, Dr. Reitlinger managed to write an authentic account of the topic with eloquence and solemnity. The book actually got me interested in the topic.

Published in 1960, I read the book in the late 1970s, and it is one of the books that made me interested in the topic – so much so that it set me on an academic path, which led me to research Nazi Germany’s occupation of eastern Europe, culminating in a work on the subject, to be published in November 2023. The book I have written is the culmination of twenty-plus years of research.

Reading Reitlinger’s work, I realized,… show more.