As a nonfiction storyteller who often explores the Holocaust and as the director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State, I’m sometimes asked to recommend books about the Third Reich’s murder of 6 million Jews and millions of Romany, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and others. A New History is the tome I often suggest. In a deceivingly simple linear approach, Laurence Rees, who conducted 25 years of primary research to construct this historical account, methodically walks us through the Holocaust’s origins and unfolding, from Hitler’s novice-Nazi days to the Allies’ death-camp liberations. But Rees avoids neat narratives, peeling away complex layers of madness. For instance, he demonstrates that boiled-over antisemitism extended far beyond Germany’s borders in the 1930s and that the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was messier than we may imagine. Only a lucid voice like Rees’ can clue us into and… show more.

As antisemitism is currently coming into fashion again around the world, I recommend this frightening true story of a young girl hiding from the Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians who were all looking to rob Jews or send them to their deaths during World War II.

It is sometimes hard to believe that people can be so cruel, but what I take away from this book is first, that these events will continue throughout history and second, that good people of strong will can survive any tragedy if they have hope, a strong will, and luck (or God) on their side.

I used to think that mine was the only family with unspoken secrets hovering in the background and spilling over into my psyche.

I learnt recently that I’m technically known as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, and it seems that Lanchester is the Roman Catholic equivalent. In this tell-all memoir, he reveals how his mother’s death precipitated his fact-finding, soul-searching investigation of his parents’ hidden lives and his own internal angst.

This was the first book I've read from a survivor of the Holocaust that gave me hope for humanity. It's hard to imagine anyone who endured the challenges Mr. Jaku did, seeing the worst side of human evil, and yet, still maintaining a positive outlook. He lived in Australia until he died in 2021. I was reading this during the height of Australia's Anti-Israel protests in 2024, and wondered how Mr. Jaku would respond to the people in his neighborhood. I would like his family to know the impact his story had on me, reminding me that we can choose how we look at our circumstances. We can let them control us or we can take control of them, if only in our minds.

My mother gave me this book to read when I first started writing my novel (in order to write, you have to read all the time), and it profoundly affected me and gave me so much inspiration for my book. It had so many similar stories in it that my own family had gone through during the war, so it was the perfect story for me to sink my teeth into, to find a voice for my characters. This book is so so good, for anyone who loves historical fiction.

This is the best book I read in 2023. If you’d asked me if it was possible to write a book entirely in second-person voice and poetic form, I would’ve said it’s impossible. Yet Ani Tuzman has done exactly that and done it with perfection and passion.

Tuzman writes as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, something I personally relate to. Even though she doesn’t shy away from describing intergenerational trauma, her words continually uplift through remembrance of the highest truths.

This is a debut novel from someone who constantly lives the stories that she tells—how love can overcome hate, even in the most challenging of locations. Two women, living in neighboring villages in Israel, find a way to bridge that hate with love and provide hope for all who live there and beyond.

Eisen was a fifteen-year-old boy in 1944 when the Nazis sent him and his family to Auschwitz-Berkenau to become slave labour. He tells the story after seventy years, recalling the back-breaking work and his survival through luck or chance and the kindness of some good people. This is a “must-read” for anyone who thinks that this atrocity didn’t or couldn’t happen in our modern world, and an inspiration to those of us who sometimes feel our own struggles are insurmountable. This book touched me personally because my own children’s grandfather was sent to the same concentration camp.

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.

This is an excellent book that speaks to those who have inherited trauma from their ancestors. While Baack uses ample research and narratives about the victims of the Holocaust, the book is relevant for other descendants of long or short-lasting, acknowledged or non-acknowledged traumas, including: victims of genocides, ethnic cleansings, refugee camp residents, racism, wars, and other forms of victimization or natural disasters - and - their witnesses. Based on interviews with many descendants of trauma, the author focuses on giving the ‘inheritors’ a platform to describe, not only, their parents’ histories, but mostly their own. The book is instructional, as she also includes questions for individual or group reflection. The author’s emphasis on the non-pathological perspective is both productive and a relief, including chapters on resilience, post-traumatic grown, epigenetics, and more.

I am passionate about the book because I am a child of Holocaust survivors. Over many years, I… show more.