avatiakh (Kerry) reads to understand

Welcome to my thread.
I'll be recording my reading on Holocaust related fiction and nonfiction here. It will be very useful to have it all in one place for my reference. I will also be listing past reading here too.
I read a lot of children's and YA books on this subject as I'm interested in how the subject is portrayed to young people.

Currently reading:
The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz - written in 1938 after Kristallnacht.

Record of adult books read - fiction - nonfiction

Man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl (1946) - read in 2018
Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search For A Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (2017)
No place to lay one's head by Françoise Frenkel (1945) - read in 2017
Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski (1944) - read in 2014
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination by Otto Dov Kulka (2013) - read in 2014
Defiance: the Bielski partisans by Nechama Tec (1993) - read in 2013
The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII by Howard Blum - read in 2011
Castles Burning by Magda Denes - read in 2010
If this is man / The Truce by Primo Levi - read in 2008

Fiction
The Most Precious of Cargoes: A Tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg (2019 French) (2020 English) - read in 2021
And the rat laughed by Nava Semel - read in 2018
The man who never stopped sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld (2010 Hebrew) (2017 Eng) - read in 2017
What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank: Stories
by Nathan Englander - read in 2012
The Auschwitz Violin by Maria Àngels Anglada (2010) (1994, Spain) - Read in 2012
Fatelessness : a novel by Imre Kertész - read in 2011
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels - read in 2010
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick - read pre-LT
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally - read pre-LT

Record of children's, young adult, graphic novels/memoirs / picturebooks read
Emil and Karl by Yankev Glatshteyn (1940 Yiddish) - read in 2010
After the war by Carol Matas (1996) - Read in 2011
A Family Secret (2007) & The Search (2007) by Eric Heuval - Read in 2013
Dancing on the Bridge of Avignon by Ida Vos (1989) - read in 2015
Hide and Seek by Ida Vos (1981 Dutch) (1991 Eng) - read in 2015
Someday we will fly by Rachel DeWoskin (2019) - read in 2020
Alexander Altmann A10567 by Suzy Zail (2014) - read in 2021

Just to get started here are some of my 2021 reads -


Alexander Altmann A10567 by Suzy Zail (2014) - YA
A Holocaust story based on the experiences of Fred Steiner, who Zail met at the Sydney Holocaust Museum where he is a volunteer.
14 year old Alex lies about his age to survive selection and then manages to get work in the Horse Commando at Auschwitz.
I was not aware of the Horse Commando until reading this book and Lisa found 'an article on the Polish blacksmith who has sent to Auschwitz for burning an effigy of Hitler. He forged the sign "Arbeit macht frei." His act of resistance? The B in Arbeit is placed in upside down.'
https://hoofcare.blogspot.com/2017/01/blacksmith-of-auschwitz-horse-hoof-smoke.h...


The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid (2017 Hebrew) (2020 English) - fiction
The book is in the form of a report, the writer has been employed by Yad Vashem for several years to be a guide for school & military Holocaust tours to Poland. He's thrown himself into the work and slowly unravels as the weight of history, memory etc weighs in.
He knows all the facts, how to get an emotional response from school kids but questions about the why behind it all start to overwhelm him.
Thought provoking and I'm glad to have read it.


The Most Precious of Cargoes: A Tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg (2019 French) (2020 English) - fable / novella
A Holocaust fable, set in a Polish forest where the death trains from Drancy (Paris) pass through on their way to Auschwitz-Birkenau. A father, wraps one of his twin babies in his prayer shawl and throws her out the carriage window into the snow where a woman stands. The woman, the barren wife of a woodcutter, has always wanted a child even though now there is famine all around them. The woodcutter is happy to have no children, only two mouths to feed during this bitter war.
Enchanting read that Grumberg wrote for those taken to the death camps from Drancy. These included the author's blind grandfather and on another train, his father. He includes the statistics:
11 Nov 1941: Convoy 45 took 778 Jewish men, there were 2 survivors by 1945.
2 March 1943: Convoy 49 contained 1000 Jews, six survived.
And sadly Abraham & Chaja Wiesenfeld along with their twin daughters, Fernande & Jeannine (born 9 Nov 1943) were sent from Drancy, Convoy 64 on 7 Dec 1943.

Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search For A Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (2017)
Read in 2018
Wichtel is a well known journalist here in New Zealand, and this memoir has been extremely popular since it was published. She was born in Vancouver to a New Zealand mother and a Polish Jewish father. Her father had jumped from the train as it took Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka and he was one of the very few survivors from his family. When she was 13 her mother took the 3 children back to New Zealand, her father was meant to tidy up some business affairs and follow but never did and died alone a few years later.
This is the story of how, years later, Wichtel puts the pieces of her father's story back together, it's also a reminder of how Holocaust survivors were haunted all their lives by guilt and memories of their lost families. Wichtel, being a journalist, injects more into this than just family memories, she also discusses other Holocaust books and psychology studies. The trips into Poland are detailed and helpful to other family researchers.

Here's a review by Wichtel for The Choice by Edith Eger - http://www.noted.co.nz/currently/profiles/the-holocaust-survivor-who-once-danced...

Emil and Karl by Yankev Glatshteyn (1940 Yiddish ed) (2006 English ed)
YA fiction
Read in 2010
What sets this book apart from other Holocaust reads is that it was written as World War 2 broke out. Glatshteyn, a Yiddish writer, had returned in the 1930s to his native Poland after 20 years absence and was shaken by the change in attitudes in European society towards the Jewish people and the rise of Hitler. On returning to the US he wrote Emil and Karl for Jewish children in the Yiddish schools as well as writing for adults.
Emil is Jewish, Karl is not, but his parents are Socialists. They are best friends and forced onto the streets in 1938 Vienna when both lose their parents. Totally vulnerable and only 9 years old, they see and experience the bitter hatred the townspeople hold for the Jews.
This is a remarkable book and was based on many events reported in newspapers at the time.

Hide and Seek by Ida Vos (1981 Dutch) (1991 Eng)
children's fiction
Read in 2015
This is an autobiographical novel that closely follows the experiences of Vos and her family during the years of WW2.
I found it very heartfelt in the young girl's experiences of the early days of Nazi occupied Holland, the shame of having to wear a star, giving up her birthday bicycle when Jews were no longer allowed them, not being allowed to sit on benches, go into shops, follow friends into the park, walking past the horrid 'Jew' poster on her way to school (Jewish children were no longer able to ride the trams) etc etc.
While many Dutch agreed with the antisemitic policies, there were many who helped hide families, though oftentimes as in Vos' case the parents were separated from the children.
Especially telling were the chapters about the aftermath of the war, how so many people never came back.

From wikipedia: 'During the 1970s Vos was admitted to a hospital due to her war traumas. This led to writing about her experiences, first as poems, but soon in the shape of stories and - eventually - children's books. Central in her work was the infringement on her freedom by the Nazi occupiers and the time she spend in hiding.'

Last year it was brought to light that Jews, returning from concentration camps were forced by the Amsterdam city council to pay back taxes and fines on their property seized by the Nazis - http://www.timesofisrael.com/amsterdam-fined-taxed-holocaust-survivors-in-hiding... - City of Amsterdam fined hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors for failing to pay taxes while they were in hiding or in concentration camps.

excellent review here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-395-56470-7

Dancing on the Bridge of Avignon by Ida Vos (1989)
children's fiction
Read in 2015
Rosa, a young violin virtuoso, describes daily life under German occupation and the slowly diminishing rights of the Jewish population; sudden deportations, only permitted to shop between 3-5pm, a curfew at 8pm, no visits to the park, rides on the tram, no longer allowed to visit non-Jewish homes and the much hated yellow star they are forced to wear even in their homes. She keeps a list on her bedroom wall along with the date of each new regulation.
There are many Dutch who thrive on this oppression of the Jewish community, even so Rosa's parents refuse to consider going into hiding as that will put their compatriots at risk if they are found. Because Rosa can no longer have lessons with her music teacher as she can no longer go to a non-Jewish home her uncle finds her a remarkable Jewish musician and famous conductor, Mr Goldstein, to learn from. Her uncle also has a plan for the family to get to safety, to Avignon in the south of France.
Ida Vos's own experiences of the war provides the background to this novel. She bases the character of the uncle 'Sandor' on real life Friedrich Weinreb - who 'became notorious for selling a fictitious escape route for Jews from the occupied Netherlands in the Second World War. When his scheme fell apart in 1944, he left his home in Scheveningen and went in hiding in Ede. He was imprisoned for 3.5 years after the war for defraud as well as collaboration with the German occupier. In his memoirs published in 1969 he maintained that his plans were to give Jews hope for survival and that he had assumed that the liberation of the Netherlands would take place before his customers were deported. .' from wikipedia

The characters of Mr Goldstein, the musician and Brammertje, the hairdresser/cleaner are both especially memorable.

The Lead Soldiers by Uri Orlev (1956)
fiction
Read in 2011
This autobiographical first novel is about the survival of two boys who lose their mother and whose father is a prisoner in Russia for the duration of the war. Young brothers (Yurik 8yrs & Kalik 6yrs), brought up Polish rather than Jewish, inevitably become caught up in the tragedy of war. What is effectively captured here are the insignificant details that interest children and occupy their time even when living through daily tragedy. When Yurik is in hiding with his younger brother, they squabble, daydream and play war with their toy soldiers, dreaming up ceremonies, parades and official dinners, making at times enough noise that they could be found out by neighbours. When the war is over, they search through empty cottages for toys rather than utensils, tools and food. These small boys survive through the efforts of their aunt who remains intensely strong and loyal throughout. From a comfortable middleclass life in a suburb of Warsaw, they move with their mother to their father’s consulting rooms in the city and then into the ghetto. As the Nazis empty the ghetto they are smuggled out and taken into hiding with local families and finally sent to Bergen Belsen camp.
There is honesty in Orlev’s writing, and that intensifies the narrative. I have very much enjoyed reading all his children's novels. Another book that comes to mind is Magda Denes’s Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War which is a memoir of a precocious child. Once you get her mindset it is riveting reading.

Thanks to you and Lisa for setting this up, Kerry.

I will try to read something most months.

Thanks Paul. I was happy to do this as a place for us to record our reading. So many books already mentioned that were not known to me.

The man who never stopped sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld (2010 Hebrew) (2017 Eng)
fiction / Read in 2016
Appelfeld uses his own personal experience to inform this his latest work to be translated to English. I was captivated. It's the story of Erwin, beginning as he arrives to the south of Italy at the end of WW2. He's a teenager, on his own having survived the Holocaust. He joins a group of Zionist Youth who train for the life of a pioneer in Mandate Palestine. His way of coping is through sleep, and a dream-like existence while sleeping where he revisits the past, talks with his parents, uncles etc. He prefers these dreams where he's back in familiar places to the reality of real life where he's alone and forced to adopt a new language, name and new way of life.
This novel was excellent at representing the internal life of a traumatised Holocaust survivor.

From the NYT review:
'All of Appelfeld’s books draw in some way on his own extraordinary youth. Because he mines the painful bedrock of his life, it is worth knowing some of its most harrowing incidents, the ore from which he extracts the allusive, metaphorical poetry of his fiction. He was born Erwin Appelfeld in 1932 to a prosperous, assimilated German-speaking Jewish family in Bukovina, a territory of shifting borders between Romania and Ukraine. He was 9 years old when the Romanian Army retook the region from its Soviet occupiers in 1941, murdering his mother as he lay upstairs in bed, ill with mumps. He jumped out the window and escaped that attack, only to be rounded up and deported to a Nazi concentration camp. There he escaped again, rolling out under a fence and hiding in the forest before joining the Soviet Army as a cook. At the end of the war, he spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy, then was recruited as a pioneer and brought to British Mandate Palestine.

Appelfeld was 14 years old when he began to learn Hebrew, the language in which he would become a writer. “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping” is much preoccupied with this process of binding oneself into a new language, with what is lost and what is gained in such a process. At a convalescent home, the wounded Aharon tries to fuse himself to Hebrew by copying passages from a Bible a rabbi had pressed into his hands when he lay, semiconscious, in the hospital. “I was glad that I understood most of the words. The Binding of Isaac: the story was dreadful but was told with restraint, in a few words, perhaps so that we could hear the silence between them. I felt a closeness to those measured sentences, and it didn’t seem to be a story with a moral, because what was the moral? Rather, it was intended to seep into one’s cells.”'

Thanks for the reviews! I'm particularly intrigued by Emil and Karl and Driving to Treblinka.

Someday we will fly by Rachel DeWoskin (2019)
YA / Read in 2020
A Jewish family flees Warsaw for Shanghai, China during WW2 minus the mother who disappears a day before they are due to leave. It's a struggle to survive in Shanghai, a haven from Hitler but still an extremely difficult place to live. The title refers to the parents having been trapeze artists in a circus, the oldest daughter hopes to be a performer too.
DeWoskin was inspired to write the book after visiting the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum when she lived in Shanghai.
Sydney Taylor Book Award for Young Adult (2020). There's a Horn Book interview with DeWoskin about her research, well worth reading. She mentions that Michael Blumenthal, a former Treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter, is a Shanghai Jew and had been helpful.
I noted at the time to read his book From Exile to Washington.

Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski (1944)
nonfiction / memoir - Read in 2014
A book that everyone should read.
Karski was active in the Polish Underground during World War II. While acting as a courier he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured before managing to escape with local resistance help. He was taken to the Warsaw Ghetto and also an extermination camp at Izbica in order to bear witness before he travelled to England and the USA in 1942. He was the first diplomat to give eye witness accounts to Allied leaders about the atrocities of the Nazis including the extermination of the Jews. This memoir gives a quite thorough overview of the Polish Underground.
I had not heard directly of Karski until I recently watched Claude Lanzmann's 9 hr documentary Shoah. Karski was one of many interviewed, and his painful testimony was memorable. There are several more hours of his interview footage available at the Holocaust Museum.
2014 was declared by the Polish government as the Year of Jan Karski.

'Captured by the Nazis, he was tortured, freed by the Underground, and recruited to clandestinely visit the Warsaw Ghetto and other Jewish population centers to report to Western leaders about the Final Solution — the leaders, including Roosevelt and Churchill, dismissed his accurate, firsthand accounts of Nazi atrocities and inhuman living conditions as exaggerated.
Persona non grata in communist Poland and close-lipped about his WWII exploits, Karski was little-known in his homeland or abroad until Communism fell a quarter-century ago and he went back to Poland for the first time. He spent his post-Polish life as a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington
“I faithfully and honestly reported what I remembered,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1944 memoirs, “Story of a Secret State.”'


Some interesting info and visuals: http://culture.pl/en/article/photographic-memory-snapshots-of-the-emissary

The War within these walls by Aline Sax (2013)
illustrated YA novel / Read in 2014
This is by Belgium writer Aline Sax and is about the Warsaw Uprising from the POV of a young Jewish boy who is also a fighter. You could almost consider it a graphic novel, it is definitely a work of art, with much thought taken over the layout and use of black on white and reverse. Some pages only have a line of text and others several paragraphs. The drawings by Caryl Strzelechi are interesting, not finely drawn. The book itself is a shade taller and narrower than the usual book shape and this gives it additional appeal even though the cover illustration is quite grim. The story itself is poignant.

The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski (1986)
fiction / Read in 2013

A Holocaust novel set in Warsaw just before the Uprising. Blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful Mrs Seidenman is a Jewish widow but living under an assumed identity as the wife of an absent Polish officer. She is denounced in the street and arrested by the Gestapo. Thanks to the efforts of her admirers she is eventually set free. The book covers the events of these few days. Szczypiorski writes a fairly unpredictable and abrupt sort of tale. He introduces characters by first telling you their fate, so you know before meeting young Henryczek, an escapee from the Ghetto, that he is going to go back and perish in the Uprising in just a few days time.
I loved the writing - ''In this spot alone,'' he thinks, ''the wild, swarthy and cunning snout of Asia stared from time immemorial straight into the fat, arrogant and stupid mug of Europe; precisely here and nowhere else the pensive and sensitive eyes of Asia gazed into the rational eyes of Europe.'

The Shadow Children by Steven Schnur (1994)
children's fiction / Read in 2013

A holocaust story that comes with haunting illustrations by Herbert Tauss. A young boy goes to stay with his grandfather in a remote French village for the summer a few years after the war. He 'sees' children but no one will talk about them, his grandfather's horse won't go past a stone bridge in the nearby woods. By the end of the book we find out that the village had to give up the many Jewish children they'd been sheltering and the Nazis loaded them onto a local train that ran through the woods near the bridge. They never came back but their memory haunts all the village inhabitants. (96pg)
Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers (1994)

The Extra by Kathryn Lasky (2013)
YA fiction / Read in 2013

Lasky's latest book focuses on the Gypsy Holocaust in WW2 and the role of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl obtained gypsies from the camps to serve as extras in her movie which should have been shot in Spain but during the war was made in Germany. The main character is based on the real life gypsy girl who was Riefenstahl's horse riding stand-in.
Interesting story and a welcome read.
The author notes were very interesting and a critical documentary made about Riefenstahl's treatment of the gypsies was suppressed and the only copy is held by her legal people.

Defiance: the Bielski partisans by Nechama Tec (1993)
nonfiction / audiobook
Read in 2013

I watched the 2008 movie based on this book a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. The book itself is based on interviews with the various survivors who recounted their time with the partisan group. This was really interesting focusing on life in the forests, avoiding the Germans and then coming under the authority of the Soviets. Tec does a good job of giving us an understanding of the character of the three main brothers especially that of Tuvia who she was able to interview only a couple of weeks before he died in 1987.
I enjoyed learning about the camp and how Tuvia set up the many workshops which gave work to the non-fighting members - such as the bakery, metalworking, a tannery and shoe making etc etc which all came to be valued by the other non-Jewish fighting groups. Tec devoted a couple of chapters to the women of the group and how they adapted, many became partners of the fighters in order to have a better chance of survival.

See Under: Love by David Grossman 1989 translated from Hebrew by Betsy Rosenberg.
Read in 2009
Grossman is an Israeli novelist and this is his second novel.
The novel is divided into four distinct sections.
The first section is set in the 1950's and is about a child, Momik, whose parents and neighbours are all Holocaust survivors. There is a wall of silence regarding the War and Momik just has glimpses of the mysterious land 'Over There' and the 'Nazi Beast'. Grossman gets right into the psyche of a young child and creates a small masterpiece in this section as Momik battles 'the beast' on his own. This is a brilliant stand-alone piece that gave me enough stamina to endure the next section which is the most challenging section of the book. Here we find Momik, now a flawed adult, still obessed with the Holocaust even to the expense of his marriage. Communing with the sea, Momik seeks the truth of an alternate fate for writer Bruno Schulz who was shot by Nazis, and here Grossman takes us off into a magical world of the ocean, spawning salmon and Momik himself floating in the sea attempting to find this answer to writer Bruno Schulz's alternate life as a fish.
And on to the third section which takes place in a death camp and there are still magical elements at play here. Momik's greatuncle Anshel Wasserman is forced to tell stories, like Scheherazade, to the Camp Commander Obersturmbannfurer Neigel. These stories are based on the characters of a popular children's series he wrote many years earlier that Neigel loved as a child. Momik has a presence as an imaginary onlooker, a chronicler of the events. Grossman is brilliant here subtly weaving Wasserman and his stories around Neigel until Wasserman’s bitter motive becomes clear. The last section uses encyclopedia entries to take the tale of Wasserman, Neigel and the extraordinary tales of the Children of the Heart to its inevitable end.

Overall this book was a reading experience - challenging, complex, rewarding and also very frustrating. The characters of the child Momik, Wasserman and Neigel are memorable. The magical elements of the book almost overwhelm the reader, some of the crazy characters and plots in Wasserman's stories add to your reading perplexity, but why should reading about the Holocaust ever be easy. While the first part of the book brings elements of the Israeli film - The Wooden Gun to mind the later part of the book is more David Lynch with generous sprinklings of Pans Labrynth.

>15 avatiakh: I'll add my recommendation to Kerry's: Story of a Secret State is an important and fascinating memoir that deserves wide readership.

>15 avatiakh: >22 labfs39: Noted! Thanks for the recommendation!

>15 avatiakh: Just catching up with the threads in this group, including yours. I have Story of a Secret State on my history shelf. You've inspired me to move it onto my TBR list. Thanks for the review.

>23 cbl_tn: >24 rocketjk: It's an important read.

I picked up The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square by Seph Zeimian from the library today. It was mentioned in an essay about Holocaust literature and I was lucky my library had a copy in the stacks.
And I've finally started reading Reading the Holocaust by Inga Clendinnen, which was on my son's book list for a 'Reading History' university paper he was doing. Been meaning to read this for a couple of years.
I also have out from the library Babi Yar a documentary novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov. Having already read a book about Babi Yar many years ago I'm now wondering whether this will be a reread, though I'm sure the one I read was nonfiction.
I also saw on my shelves while looking for my Babi Yar book, Eva by Meyer Levin & Escape from Sobibor by Richard Rashke, both I read years and years ago.

So after a journey through my bookshelves, I've found my paperback copy of Babi Yar and it is by Anatoly Kuznetsov, so I've already read this. I remember being very effected when reading it, it was probably the first major Holocaust book I read back in the early 1980s. I'll keep it out for rereading, but will concentrate on library books first.
I found in the dark reaches of my shelves By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi which I'll look through at a later date as well.

I have a few children's books out from the library -
Uncle Misha's Partisans by Yuri Suhl. I have They fought back by Suhl but it's such a dusty, rusted old paperback that I haven't felt like picking it up.

Masters of Silence by Kathy Kacer. Kacer has written a number of Holocaust themed middle grade novels and I haven't read any. This one focuses on the Resistance work of Marcel Marceau.

Code: Polonaise by Eva-Lis Wuorio - this book was criticised in Eric Kimmel's 1977 essay, 'Confronting the Ovens: The Holocaust and Juvenile Fiction'. 'How­ever, in one book, Eva-Lis Wuorio's Code: Polonaise (Holt), the vagueness of the fate of the Jews is especially glaring. Code: Polonaise is set in Poland, yet it never mentions the Warsaw ghetto, the murder factories as distinguished from ordinary labor camps, or the virulent anti-Semitism of the Polish population...'
I was already reading her books and will read this one with added interest.

Resistance by Carla Jablonski - a graphic novel trilogy. I thought I'd read this but haven't.

Uncle Misha's Partisans by Yuri Suhl (1973)
childrens/YA
National Jewish Book Award for Children's Literature (1974), Sydney Taylor Book Award (1973). This book gives younger readers a good look at what life was like for the partisan fighters during WW2. Young Mitak/Motele returns from his violin lesson in a nearby town to find that Nazis have slaughtered his family and other Jewish families in a nearby village. He wanders the countryside earning his keep by playing the violin and eventually ends up with a band of Jewish partisans. His musical skills and ability to speak pure Ukrainian without a Yiddish or city accent make him a valued member of the group despite being only 12 yrs old. This is a well written exciting story.

The book of Aron by Jim Shepard (2015)
fiction / Read in 2015
First note that this adult novel has a young child as narrator. We meet Aron at the start of WW2 and the invasion of Poland by the Germans when he is just 8 years old. He and his family move to Warsaw and the book chronicles Aron's life and the eventual last few weeks/months spent with Janusz Korczak and his orphanage in the ghetto.
The book can be seen as an attempt to tell the story of Korczak though through the eyes of a small boy and while I'm really happy to see his story brought to today's readers I feel that there are more interesting novels and nonfiction accounts on the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a terrible time with much deprivation and horror, yet even though Shepard tells of some of these things I just didn't feel it. At one point Aron is taken by one of the Jewish Ghetto police to a cafe where he buys two hot chocolates and when Aron doesn't agree to be an informer he drinks both. For me, I can't see how there would have been a cafe serving hot chocolate at that point in time in the ghetto, I understand that when the ghetto is first walled up there would have been, but when the Germans were well into the deportations I'm not so sure. Overall this is a good read but not one I'd recommend before others if you wanted to know more about the Warsaw Ghetto.
At the back of the novel Shepard has listed the many many books he referred as well the people he consulted with, to to write this, very extensive and I would have liked to take more note of these references but the book was due back at the library and I finished it while at a nearby cafe before dropping it back. I read a couple of Korczak's children's books earlier this year and hope to read Betty Lifton's biography sometime in the near future.

For children's books /YA on Poland during the war: Uri Orlev's Run Boy, run, The island on Bird Street, The man from the other side and Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli.

Janusz Korczak - The King of Children: the life and death of Janusz Korczakby Betty Lifton

>28 avatiakh: If I'm remembering correctly, Korczak also appears in Morris Gleitzman's Once series. I've made a note of the Lifton biography so I can learn more about him.

>28 avatiakh: I get extremely emotional whenever I read about Korczak. I would like to read the Lifton book, but I'll need to find a time when I'm feeling strong.

>29 cbl_tn: I can't remember him in the Gleitzman books, though possibly he did.
>30 labfs39: I still haven't read the Lifton biography.

Bitter Herbs: A Little Chronicle by Marga Minco (1960 Eng) (1957 Dutch)
fiction / read in 2017
A short, compelling story based on Minco's own experience during the war, is about a young Jewish girl and how she lost her family to the Holocaust. Her father says at the start of the war, "It won't come to that in Holland," but unfortunately person by person the family is taken, the girl going into hiding and becoming the only survivor. The bitter herbs of the title come from the Passover meal.
The cover does no justice to the excellent b&w illustration work on the inside by Herman Dijkstra.

I'd be interested to read more of her work.

There's a good bio of Minco here: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/minco-marga
'Minco made her literary debut with the short novel Het bittere kruid, translated into English as Bitter Herbs. In a painful, concise way the work narrates the story of a young girl during World War II. The “little chronicle,” as the subtitle calls it, achieved success both nationwide and abroad, selling four hundred thousand copies in the Netherlands alone. Awarded the Vijverberg Prize in 1958, the novel was subsequently translated into several languages and is still a popular work, particularly among secondary school pupils.
Minco’s books are distinguished by, and celebrated for, her sober, reserved way of using words and emotions. Her restrained style and cinematic turn of phrase give her books great power.'

I am Rosemarie by Marietta Moskin (1972)
YA / read in 2017
This is an autobiographical novel of Moskin's experiences as a teen girl in the Holocaust. She wrote it as a novel so she could composite some characters, put some emotional distance between herself and the main character and also so she could make the character more mature and reflective.
Rosemarie and her parents have been living some years in Amsterdam, having moved from Austria. While most of their relatives are leaving for America or Palestine, they are happy to stay in Holland. Once war breaks out it soon becomes clear that this was a bad decision. They spend about 18 months in Westerbork Transit Camp in Holland, while there they are able to get Paraguayan passports sent to them from a family member in Switzerland. These passports give them some protection and they are moved to Bergen-Belsen for a year and then after a prisoner transfer with Switzerland falls through, spend some months in a Red Cross Camp in Biberach with civilian internees who'd been deported from the Channel Islands.

Westerbork Transit Camp: From this camp, 101,000 Dutch Jews and about 5,000 German Jews were deported to their deaths in Occupied Poland. In addition, there were about 400 Gypsies in the camp and, at the very end of the War, some 400 women from the resistance movement. Only 5,200 of them survived, most of them in Theresienstadt or Bergen-Belsen, or were liberated at Westerbork.

Caging Skies by Christine Leunens (2008)
fiction / Read in 2020
Not quite a Holocaust novel but I think this one is worth mentioning due to the film made from the book.
This is the book that Taika David Waititi's mother, Robin Cohen, pressed him to read and the film Jojo Rabbit was the result. He won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. I loved the story and hurried off to read this book which inspired the film.
Caging Skies is bleak and unrelenting, what is in the film happens in the first 100 pages.
Johannes tells the story, it starts with him as an ardent member of Hitlers Youth when he discovers that his parents are hiding a Jewish girl in a hidden alcove. Elsa had been the friend of his now dead older sister. The book leaves the film behind and covers the next ten or so years.
It's well written though not a happy read and I made very slow progress. I enjoyed the movie, it is typical of Waititi's style, and am impressed how he took the soul of the story and turned it into Jojo Rabbit, letting much of the bleakness fall away.

Leunens has had an interesting life - 'Christine Leunens was born in Hartford, Connecticut to an Italian mother and a Belgian father. As a teenager she moved to Paris, where she had a close relationship with her grand-father, Guillaume Leunens, the Flemish painter and sculptor. She funded her study and early writing by modelling in Europe, becoming the face of Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Pierre Balmain and Sonia Rykiel, acting in TV ads such as Mercedes Benz, Suzuki and House of Fraser. She went on to earn a Master of Liberal Arts in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2005, and a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington in 2012...Caging Skies was adapted to stage and film. The play adaptation, written by Desirée Gezentzvey and directed by Andrew Foster, had its world premiere at the Circa Theatre, Wellington in 2017'
She now lives in New Zealand.

you should add here "Maus":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus

Banned by a McMinn County Tennessee School Board, 'Maus' Soars to the Top of Bestseller Charts. In early January, (2022) a ten-member school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to ban Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum.

>35 exhocforte: Yes, I read both vols of Maus about 10 years ago. The ban doesn't make sense.

The Safest Lie by Angela Cerrito (2015)
children's fiction / read in 2016
Not a particularly compelling cover on this book. Cerrito knew once she heard about Irena Sendler in 2004 that she'd have to write a book that would commemorate in some ways the heroic actions of Sendler in managing to smuggle over 2000 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during WW2. She travelled on a fellowship to Poland and managed to meet Sendler who was 98 at the time. She also did a lot of research, reading the testimonies of the many Jewish children who had been farmed out to Polish households and survived the war.
Many couldn't cope with the idea of being Jewish without any surviving relatives and just wanted to return to their host families where they had lived pretending to be Catholic. This was especially true of the youngest ones who had no memories of their parents.

Anna is 9yrs old when she learns Catholic prayers and her new identity before she's smuggled out from the ghetto. She lives in an orphanage run by nuns for many months before arriving to a Polish family who live in a small village. Her host family have lost their young daughter to the Lebensborn or Generalplan Ost programme (involved taking children regarded as "Aryan-looking" from the rest of Europe and moving them to Nazi Germany for the purpose of Germanization, or indoctrination into becoming culturally German).
Anna comes to love her new family, though she tries hard to remember her memories of her own real family. As the war ends she is eventually collected by a Jewish group and taken to give her testimony and learn about the fate of her parents. All she wants is to return to her host family.

I enjoyed this having watched the film, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, last year it was a good followup.
There are many Poles who are only now discovering that they have Jewish heritage as one of their parents was one of these hidden children during the war who lost their identity. http://unitedwithisrael.org/young-hidden-polish-jews-rediscover-their-jewish-her...

>37 avatiakh: This reminds me that Irena's Children has been on my TBR list for a while. It's one I think I'll need to buy since it's not readily available from any of my libraries.

Kerry, thanks for your recommendations. I appreciate the time it took for you to list so many special books. I'll return later to add many that I haven't read.

>39 Whisper1: Linda - I've read several that you recommended as well. Finally got to Mara's Stories a couple of months ago.

Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live by Lily Ebert (2022)
memoir
98 year old Lily's story became a viral sensation during the Covid lockdowns in the UK when her great grandson, Dov, tweeted a picture of her holding a banknote signed by the first US Jewish soldier/rabbi she met after escaping from a forced march. Dov bet with her that the soldier would be identified within 24 hours, it only took 8 hours!
Her story along with her years of promoting Holocaust education is in this easily accessible book. Most chapters are by Lily telling her Holocaust story, her time in Israel after the war and the family shift to the UK for her husband's health. There are a couple by Dov, telling the present day story and of the aftermath of his viral tweet.
They were helped in writing this by Dr Lydia Syson and this very much helps the book by including events that were unfolding at the time of Lily's story as well in documenting present day Holocaust Remembrance. Lily is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre in London.
Dov is still in highschool, so his role in Lily's story is quite amazing, he knew how social media worked and made it all happen.

Mara's stories : glimmers in the darkness by Gary Schmidt (2001)
folktales, Holocaust
I put this on my to read list back in 2011, I think it was because of Linda's review at the time. Excellent concept - a collection of Jewish folktales that have been adapted and retold. Each night in the concentration camp the mothers and children gather around Mara for her stories.
Schmidt includes notes on the source for each story and the how/why of the adaption. The cover illustration by Leonid Gore is particularly haunting.

Both of these sound excellent. I'll look for them.

>43 labfs39: I hope you can track them down.

I just finished reading Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey. It's described as a 'polyphonic novel of domestic drama and human connection set in and around a concentration camp in Germany during the second world war.'
The book is set around Buchenwald labour camp and told to us by three different first-person narrators - the camp administrator through his postwar interviews, an imaginary diary by his wife and the 1946 letters to his daughter by a doctor of Jewish ancestry who is an inmate of the camp. There are also short passages from the inhabitants of the nearby Weimar village.
An absorbing read, the Germans living beside such atrocity able to lead their calm lives by wilfully ignoring the truth that their eyes can see.
A good review here: https://www.anzliterature.com/anzl-review/remote-sympathy-by-catherine-chidgey/

I didn't note any books I read in 2023 so here's my list:
YA & children's books
Crushing the Red Flowers by Jennifer Voigt Kaplan
Running with Ivan by Suzanne Leal
Twenty and Ten by Claire Huchet Bishop
Broken Strings by Eric Walters
But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust by Charlotte Schallié - graphic novel

Adult:
Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski
The last of the just by André Schwarz-Bart
The Pawnbroker: A Novel by Edward Lewis Wallant
I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson
Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall

A Cat at Dachau by Elyse Hoffman - short story

I've already read a number of books this year.
The Teacher by Michal Ben-Naftali - about a survivor of the Kastner Train
The Secret Purposes by David Baddiel
The Postcard by Anne Berest
October 16, 1943 / Eight Jews by Giacomo Debenetti

Children's
Chase me, Catch Nobody by Erik C. Haugaard (1980)
Code Name Kingfisher by Liz Kessler (2023)