The best books about survivors of a horrific trauma

Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust have now died, which makes it more important than ever that we pass on knowledge about this incomparably brutal crime against humanity – and do our best to prevent future genocides.

Survival in Auschwitz is a highly detailed, profoundly disturbing, and, in the end, intensely moving account of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s eleven months in the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz.

If you wish to understand what the Holocaust meant to its victims – and how the prisoners did their heroic best to resist dehumanization, hopelessness, and death – you would do well to start with this important work.  

In this deeply disturbing novel, an elderly and despotic farmer named Larry Cook decides to give joint ownership of his 1000-acre farm in Iowa to his three daughters, although the youngest, Caroline, objects to this arrangement and is soon disinherited.

In the emotional wake of this family conflict, long-hidden revelations about how Cook sexually abused his two eldest daughters – Ginny and Rose – come to light. As the old tyrant’s mind and body deteriorate, Ginny and Rose run the farm as best they can and share their painful memories with each other.

Will they be able to make peace with a past that continually threatens their emotional well-being? And dare they continue running an enterprise that reminds them every day of their brutal father and damaged childhoods?  

Carlo Levi was a physician and writer from the northern Italian city of Turin, but in 1935 he was banished to the desperately poor Lucania region of southern Italy because of his opposition to the Fascist government led by Benito Mussolini.

Levi’s account of how he suddenly found himself a foreigner in his own country and how he was able to overcome the trauma of separation from his family and loss of his profession – and forge deep friendships with the local peasants and villagers – is one of the most beautiful and touching books I’ve ever read.  

World War I caused 20 million deaths and left 21 million wounded.

Soldiers who survived the gas attacks and trench warfare often returned to societies eager to forget the atrocities of the conflict and move on. Remarque’s insightfully written novel details the struggles of three German soldiers who return home only to discover that they may have no place in a nation that has learned almost nothing from what they regard as a senseless and immoral war.

In May of 1933, this novel and the rest of Remarque's writing were declared “unpatriotic” by the Nazi dictatorship and all his novels were banned.

This comic, clever, and subversive work is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety. The main character, Lucius, makes an error while using a witch’s balm to change himself into a bird and ends up – to his great despair – transformed into an ass. While being passed on to different owners, he is whipped and cursed and nearly butchered for his meat, learning first-hand how cruel humans can be to their fellow creatures, which is why I regard this to be the first work written in defense of animal rights. Will Lucius find a way to change back into a man?

You’ll simply have to read this captivating 1800-year-old work to find out!