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The recent shooting death of a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by an alleged neo-Nazi indicates that hatred still persists more than 60 years after the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of World War II. Many Holocaust survivors and their children recognized the importance of the written word in remembering the atrocities committed under Hitler's rule to prevent them from happening again. The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night are some of the best known writings about the Holocaust, and more memoirs and novels are being added to this genre all the time. One of the newest Holocaust memoirs is A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal, an International Court judge in The Hague. Buergenthal lived his early life in the Ghetto of Kielce and arrived at Auschwitz at age 10, but he waited decades to tell his story. He details the events that made him "lucky" and saved him from death numerous times, along with his eventual reunion with his mother after the war and the events of his adolescence that led to his becoming a human rights activist.
Survivors also have written fictional stories of the Holocaust, such as The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, which was first published in the early 1970s. Wander's nameless narrator journeys between numerous concentration camps (Wander himself spent time in 20 camps from 1938 to 1945) and focuses on the pre-war stories and sufferings of the forced laborers he has befriended, the social hierarchies among the prisoners, the thoughts of the walking dead, and even the many ways to eat meager bread rations.
Children of Holocaust survivors are contributing to the genre as well. Dave Clarke incorporates stories told by his parents in Keeping Hannah Waiting, a fictional account of the painter Marc Chagall, his love affair with a young woman destined for the camps, and the quest of another young woman in the present day to reunite Chagall's painting of his true love with its rightful owner.
These books, along with other accounts of the Holocaust, are sad, brutally honest, and sometimes even graphic in their descriptions of the Jews' experiences during the war, but they each aim to present the truth and offer a glimmer of hope for the future.
Comments
Great first article. Now go Tweet!
Great job!
This is a great article. I agree that reading about the Holocaust is important as a reminder of a past we don't want to repeat.
Great article!
Great job
A very good article. I recently acquired A Lucky Child and look forward to reading it. I'll put The Seventh Well on my tbr list too.
Very insightful and well written article. I am also looking forward to reading A LUCKY CHILD.
Excellent article Anna! You should be very proud of this. I love how you worked current events into the books that shows what happens when we let hate dictate our actions.
I am grateful that books such as these exist. We should never forget this horrible event in human history.
Thank you very much for the article.
What's important is that we teach our children the truth about the Holocaust. I wrote about the Holocaust because I felt it critical to discount Holocaust deniers. These mendacious historical revisers desire only one thing - to finish that which Hitler began with the Jewish people. There are many vulnerable individuals whose weak minds can be turned into hatred of minorities. It happened in 20th Century Europe. It can happen again. If we had learned from the Holocaust, we would not have witnessed Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur. Prejudice continues. Someone has to stop the blind hatred.
"Jacob's Courage" is a tender coming of age love story of two young adults living in Salzburg at the time when the Nazi war machine enters Austria. This historical novel presents accurate scenes and situations of Jews in ghettos and concentration camps, with particular attention to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.
Great article! I have A Lucky Child on my shelf (haven't read it yet). I haven't heard of the two fiction books before. Thanks for the info!
I'll have to read this one after a pause. I just read The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society and Yolen's Briar Rose, so I need a pause.
This is such an important reminder to all never to forget the atrocities of the Holocaust. Literature and reading can touch our world and remind us all. Thanks for pointing us to these wonderful books.
Thanks, everyone! I really appreciate your comments.
Hi Anna, I have heard of really great things about a Holocaust love story called Lizzie & Fredl. My girlfriend read and cried through the whole book. Do you know anything about it? Two other girls at my summer camp read it two and they said it was great. They like it almost as much as Twilight. Can you review it?
Thanks
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