100 Books Like Trap with a Green Fence

How could ordinary policemen be implicated in the Holocaust by participating in mass shootings of Jews? After SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the police forces in 1936, he was able to call up regular (i.e., non Nazified) police battalions and order them into Nazi-occupied Poland.

The historian Browning's book is based on the post-war interrogations of some of these policemen for trial. Browning delves into the reasons they went along with the mass shootings, even though they could have opted out and requested a different assignment.

His gripping analysis shows how peer pressure shapes individuals, and how participation in unspeakable, genocidal crimes becomes possible in an order-based hierarchy.

Wendy Lower’s powerful examination of the role of German women as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators in the Holocaust exposed the participation of women in the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.

Focusing on individual histories, Lower reveals the backgrounds, actions, and motivations of a cohort of mostly young women who became complicit in mass murder.

Full of haunting descriptions, the image of the wife of a German SS officer leading a group of naked Jewish boys to a woods near her home and shooting them as they wept because she wanted to prove her toughness to the men is only one unforgettable example of women’s participation in the Holocaust.

The Reich Security Main Office, founded in September 1939, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich (until his death in 1942), and which included the Security Service and the Gestapo, was the organizational center of the Nazis’ murderous racial policy.

The historian Wildt's book shows how extermination plans were prepared and worked out in this office—in part by young, career-minded academics. Some of them were not just "desk perpetrators" but were directly involved in the mass murder as leaders of the notorious Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Soviet territories. One famous case is Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D, who openly confessed to killing 90,000 Jews in his trial.

Wildt discusses the post-war trials of these men by the American authorities, as well as the German publics’ growing ambivalence towards the trials.

Before being drafted into the German Army in 1941, Willy Peter Reese was a bank clerk who spent his time engaged in reading German literature and attempting to become a writer in his own right.

The memoir is a compilation of his journal entries as he reflected on his transition from civilian to soldier. Originally published in German, Reese’s journal demonstrates the way in which a relatively naïve and carefree intellectual became involved in the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union.

The transformation from a bookish, sensitive, and brooding teenager into a soldier who lost empathy for the people suffering under German occupation demonstrates how some German youth became actors and accomplices in the Nazi regime’s crimes.

A memoir written by a holocaust survivor’s experience, as well as that of her family, Martin tells the story of how the war came to their lives and uprooted their daily lives.

I met Martin when she signed my copy of her book, so this one holds a special place for me. The story is told from multiple perspectives, as Martin and her siblings take turns describing the ordeals they went through both inside concentration camps and out.

Heartbreaking and harrowing at times, the story also makes a point to address things that helped Martin’s family smile in spite of it all. Martin’s story reminds us of why we keep going, as well as shows us how her family endured the six long years of the war. 

Zable writes of the haunted consciousness of post-conflict generations, in his case, the holocaust.

He argues that great stories must have both terror and beauty, or they merely add to the darkness. It is easy to see the terror, but what of the jewels? I grappled with this question too - how do we rightly remember victims of extreme violence? When I looked to Zable, I found a work imbued with poetry and lyricism.

Jewels and Ashes is a transcendent retracing of the terrain of his parents and grandparents.

Elsa Thon recounts her war experiences in a cinematic tale with the eye of an artist. A teenager in Poland who had apprenticed in photo retouching, she was recruited by the Jewish underground. She left her family behind in the Warsaw Ghetto, ending up in Krakow with false papers. This was difficult for her, a deeply honest person. She writes, “I lied all the time.” She takes the reader with her on her dangerous journey, the degradation of a labour camp, and a forced march. Elsa was also a student in my seniors writing class and I found her to be generous and good-humoured, despite her painful past. She lost her whole family in the Holocaust but she writes that it was her “destiny” to survive. 

I appreciated the author’s meticulously researched account of her parents' remarkable survival in Poland.

Her writing is very emotional yet beautiful and fact-based. The details capture the complexity of survival during these dark days. Moreover, she is able to convey the randomness of individual outcomes, and the unfathomable resilience of the ones who managed to stay alive and tell their tale.

To learn about the Holocaust, I read personal remembrances, eyewitness accounts, and detailed descriptions of ghettos, camps, and transports, but this graphic novel based on Spiegelman’s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words can’t say, both as his father lived it and as his son learns about it. Banning it from U.S. schools would be completely wrongheaded. It should be required reading.

"It was like living on a desert island. Instead of the sea, there were houses and people around me." Aleks, aged 11, uses a metaphor fetched from his favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, to describe his own struggle for survival. But his "island" is a ruined house in the ghetto, where he hides after having been separated from his father during a raid by the Nazis. Just as resourceful and inventive as his literary role model, Aleks manages to fend for himself while hoping for his father to return.

Uri Orlev, himself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen, succeeds in combining a classic adventure story with a realistic narrative of the Holocaust. I don't know how he does it, but I know that his book is a masterpiece.