Love Elli? Readers share 100 books like Elli...

By Livia E. Bitton Jackson,

Here are 100 books that Elli fans have personally recommended if you like Elli. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis

Helen Roche Author Of The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

From my list on childhood in Nazi Germany.

Why am I passionate about this?

Why did I end up spending almost a third of my life researching Nazi boarding schools, and childhood under the Third Reich more generally? I sometimes wonder if it was because I myself was sent to boarding school at the age of nine ā€“ somehow, I can sympathise with what these children had to endure, as well as knowing full well from a historianā€™s perspective which hardships were truly unique to a National Socialist elite education, and which were simply the kind of heart-ache thatā€™s common to any institution which takes children away from their parents at a young ageā€¦ 

Helen's book list on childhood in Nazi Germany

Helen Roche Why did Helen love this book?

Nick Stargardtā€™s Witnesses of War is the kind of book Iā€™d love to write ā€“ itā€™s really one of the most comprehensive and accessible studies of childrenā€™s experiences under Nazism out there. The author doesnā€™t shy away from describing the lives of the Third Reichā€™s youthful victims in harrowing detail, but he also explores the lives of children who were seduced by the Nazi dictatorship. "In war," he writes, "all children are victims." 

By Nicholas Stargardt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Witnesses of War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Even in this most murderous of European wars, children were not merely passive victims of genocide, bombing, mechanised warfare, starvation policies and mass flight. They were also active participants, going out to smuggle food, ply the black market, and care for sick parents and siblings. As they absorbed the brutal new realities of German occupation, Polish boys played at being Gestapo interrogators, and Jewish children at being ghetto guards or the SS. Within days of Germany's own surrender, German children were playing at being Russian soldiers. As they imagined themselves in the roles of their enemies, children expressed their hopes,ā€¦


Book cover of School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis

Helen Roche Author Of The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

From my list on childhood in Nazi Germany.

Why am I passionate about this?

Why did I end up spending almost a third of my life researching Nazi boarding schools, and childhood under the Third Reich more generally? I sometimes wonder if it was because I myself was sent to boarding school at the age of nine ā€“ somehow, I can sympathise with what these children had to endure, as well as knowing full well from a historianā€™s perspective which hardships were truly unique to a National Socialist elite education, and which were simply the kind of heart-ache thatā€™s common to any institution which takes children away from their parents at a young ageā€¦ 

Helen's book list on childhood in Nazi Germany

Helen Roche Why did Helen love this book?

Written during the Third Reich itself, this is the hard-hitting book that told the world just how heinous Nazi education policy was ā€“ although it was only heeded by a prescient few at the time. Anyone who is worried about how easily schooling can become subject to ideology should definitely read this book!

By Erika Mann,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked School for Barbarians as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Published in 1938, when Nazi power was approaching its zenith, this well-documented indictment reveals the systematic brainwashing of Germany's youth. The Nazi program prepared for its future with a fanatical focus on national preeminence and warlike readiness that dominated every department and phase of education. Methods included alienating children from their parents, promoting notions of racial superiority instead of science, and developing a cult of personality centered on Hitler.
Erika Mann, a member of the World War II generation of German youth, observed firsthand the Third Reich's perversion of a once-proud school system and the systematic poisoning of family life.ā€¦


Book cover of Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows

Helen Roche Author Of The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

From my list on childhood in Nazi Germany.

Why am I passionate about this?

Why did I end up spending almost a third of my life researching Nazi boarding schools, and childhood under the Third Reich more generally? I sometimes wonder if it was because I myself was sent to boarding school at the age of nine ā€“ somehow, I can sympathise with what these children had to endure, as well as knowing full well from a historianā€™s perspective which hardships were truly unique to a National Socialist elite education, and which were simply the kind of heart-ache thatā€™s common to any institution which takes children away from their parents at a young ageā€¦ 

Helen's book list on childhood in Nazi Germany

Helen Roche Why did Helen love this book?

This is a book that grabbed my attention straight away because it shows just how powerful the human spirit can be. Eisen explores the ways in which children caught in the horror of the Holocaust attempted to make sense of their surroundings. They might be playing in bomb craters; they might even be playing alongside the death-camps of Auschwitz, but these childrenā€™s spirit of play survived even in the shadow of annihilation. 

By George Eisen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Children and Play in the Holocaust as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An interdisciplinary study of the Holocaust combining history, psychology and anthropology, which analyzes the use of play in Jewish communities to bring an element of sanity into the lives of young people in the midst of the catastrophe.


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorā€”and only womanā€”on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route upā€¦

Book cover of Survivors: Children's Lives After the Holocaust

Helen Roche Author Of The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

From my list on childhood in Nazi Germany.

Why am I passionate about this?

Why did I end up spending almost a third of my life researching Nazi boarding schools, and childhood under the Third Reich more generally? I sometimes wonder if it was because I myself was sent to boarding school at the age of nine ā€“ somehow, I can sympathise with what these children had to endure, as well as knowing full well from a historianā€™s perspective which hardships were truly unique to a National Socialist elite education, and which were simply the kind of heart-ache thatā€™s common to any institution which takes children away from their parents at a young ageā€¦ 

Helen's book list on childhood in Nazi Germany

Helen Roche Why did Helen love this book?

I first had the privilege of reading Survivors when we were searching for a new professor of transnational history in my department at Durham University; Rebecca is now a treasured colleague, and her ability to tell these child survivorsā€™ stories is second to none! Her writing is humane, passionate, and exquisite. I would recommend this book to anyone who truly wants to understand the impact of the Holocaust on those who survived it as children.

By Rebecca Clifford,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Survivors as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Cundill History Prize

Told for the first time from their perspective, the story of children who survived the chaos and trauma of the Holocaust-named a best history book of 2020 by the Daily Telegraph

"Impressive, beautifully written, judicious and thoughtful. . . . Will be a major milestone in the history of the Holocaust and its legacy."-Mark Roseman, author of The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting

How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressingā€¦


Book cover of When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains

Julie Brill Author Of Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia

From my list on the Holocaust legacy by descendants of survivors.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a child, I held conflicting beliefs. I knew my Jewish grandfather had been murdered by Germans in occupied Yugoslavia, yet I somehow believed the Holocaust had never come to his hometown of Belgrade. The family anecdotes my father passed down, a blend of his early memories and what my grandmother told him, didnā€™t match what I had heard about Germany, Poland, and Anne Frank in Holland during World War II. That started me on a lifelong journey to learn everything I can about the Holocaust, especially in parts of Europe that have received less attention, and to understand the long-reaching effects of genocide on the survivorā€™s children and grandchildren.

Julie's book list on the Holocaust legacy by descendants of survivors

Julie Brill Why did Julie love this book?

Our experiences are quite different; Newmann grew up in Venezuela and didnā€™t know her father was Jewish, let alone that heā€™d survived the Holocaust. Yet, what drew me in was her desire to understand the pieces of her family story that were unexplained and the secrets that didnā€™t quite make sense.

Her quest to understand her father and his family, whom she never got to meet, kept me engaged until the end. We need to understand our past to understand ourselves.

By Ariana Neumann,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked When Time Stopped as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this astonishing story that ā€œreads like a thriller and is so, so timelyā€ (BuzzFeed) Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her fatherā€™s past: ā€œLike Anne Frankā€™s diary, it offers a story that needs to be told and heardā€ (Booklist, starred review).

In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.

Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of theā€¦


Book cover of Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

Matthew Arnold Stern Author Of The Remainders

From my list on Jewish families in crisis.

Why am I passionate about this?

Reseda, California plays an important part in my novels. I grew up there in a middle-class Jewish family, and we experienced the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. My parents got divorced, and my brother and I were raised by our working mom until she became paralyzed by a stroke. I found refuge in writing. I wrote The Remainders in 2016 during a tumultuous time when issues of family conflict, homelessness, and the growing cruelty of society came into focus. Still, I believe decency and compassion will prevail. The books I write and enjoy reading seek to find light in the darkest of circumstances.

Matthew's book list on Jewish families in crisis

Matthew Arnold Stern Why did Matthew love this book?

I read this powerful graphic novel series when the first collections came out in the 1980s.

It shows the horrors of the Holocaust and the impact it has on the families of the survivors. Maus is best known for depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, but Artā€™s troubled relationship with his father Vladik and the death of his mother Anja by suicide frame the story.

Maus is my favorite graphic novel series and a must-read for understanding the Holocaust and how it shaped Jewish life since.

By Art Spiegelman,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked Maus I as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The bestselling first installment of the graphic novel acclaimed as ā€œthe most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaustā€ (Wall Street Journal) and ā€œthe first masterpiece in comic book historyā€ (The New Yorker) ā€¢ PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ā€¢ One of Varietyā€™s ā€œBanned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Readā€

A brutally moving work of artā€”widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever writtenā€”Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the authorā€™s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the authorā€™s account of hisā€¦


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Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

No Average Day by Rona Simmons,

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention onā€¦

Book cover of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust

Susan Rubin Suleiman Author Of Crises of Memory and the Second World War

From my list on collective memory of WWII and the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She has had a distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, publishing more than a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Her acclaimed memoir about returning to Budapest, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, appeared in 1996; in 2023, she published Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, a memoir of immigration which was a finalist for a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She has been awarded many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1990 and Franceā€™s highest honor, the LĆ©gion dā€™Honneur, in 2018. 

Susan's book list on collective memory of WWII and the Holocaust

Susan Rubin Suleiman Why did Susan love this book?

Marianne Hirsch is justly famous for proposing the term ā€œpostmemoryā€ to designate how the past may be remembered by those who have no personal memories of it. Memories are transmitted in families (familial postmemory), but claiming a memory can also be a matter of choice through an act of affiliation (affiliative postmemory). Hirsch is especially insightful on the role of photographs and objects in the creation of postmemories.  

By Marianne Hirsch,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Generation of Postmemory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book'sā€¦


Book cover of The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Donald L. Willerton Author Of Teddy's War

From my list on what our fathers never told us about WWII.

Why am I passionate about this?

My father never talked about his experiences during the war. After he died at 67, we found his handwritten itinerary of three years and ten days in the Army Signal Corps. Plotting it on a map sparked a passion that continued for years, taking me twice to sites in Europe and through hundreds of records and books. I am amazed at all he never told usā€”the Queen Mary troopship, his radar unitā€™s landing on Omaha Beach (D+26), the Normandy Breakout, Paris after liberation, fleeing Bastogne, and so on. I grew up on WWII films but never grasped till now what my dad may have seen. 

Donald's book list on what our fathers never told us about WWII

Donald L. Willerton Why did Donald love this book?

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 Spiegelmanā€™s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words canā€™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.

By Art Spiegelman,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The Complete Maus as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first and only graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, MAUS is a brutally moving work of art about a Holocaust survivor -- and the son who survives him

'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker

Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.

Against the backdropā€¦


Book cover of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Antony Polonsky Author Of The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History

From my list on Jews of East-Central Europe during the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

I came to England on a Rhodes Scholarship from South Africa in 1961 and have been a Professor at the London School of Economics and Brandeis University. I am the Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. My interests are the politics of Eastern Europe, the history of the Jews, and the conflict in the Middle East. I have witnessed the transition from communist rule to democracy in Poland and the end of apartheid in South Africa. There are growing threats to democracy and political pluralism, and I very much hope that these can be successfully resisted. 

Antony's book list on Jews of East-Central Europe during the Holocaust

Antony Polonsky Why did Antony love this book?

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to escape from Auschwitzā€”one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. His aim was to reveal the truth of the death camp to the worldā€”and to warn the still surviving Jews of his native Czechoslovakia and Hungary and the world of the nature of Nazi policy towards the Jews. 

Sadly, his warnings were not taken sufficiently seriously. The problem was the inability of those to whom he reported to take in the full implications of the ā€˜final solution.ā€™ Vrba was tormented for the rest of his life (he died in Canada in 2006) by his failure to persuade his interlocutors of what was actually taking place in Auschwitz.

By Jonathan Freedland,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Escape Artist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE

A MAIL ON SUNDAY, THE TIMES, THE ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN, THE SPECTATOR, TIME, AND DAILY EXPRESS/DAILY MIRROR BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2022

'Thrilling' Daily Mail

'Gripping' Guardian

'Heartwrenching' Yuval Noah Harari

'Magnificent' Philip Pullman

'Excellent' Sunday Times

'Inspiring' Daily Mail

'An immediate classic' Antony Beevor

'Awe inspiring' Simon Sebag Montefiore

'Shattering' Simon Schama

'Utterly compelling' Philippe Sands

'A must-read' Emily Maitlis

'Indispensable' Howard Jacobson

April 1944. Nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellowā€¦


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Book cover of Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle against the Nazi Occupation of France

Doctors at War by Ellen Hampton,

Doctors at War: The Clandestine Battle against the Nazi Occupation of France takes readers into the moral labyrinth of the Occupation years, 1940-45, to examine how the medical community dealt with the evil authority imposed on them. Anti-Jewish laws prevented many doctors from practicing, inspiring many to form secret medicalā€¦

Book cover of The Holocaust: A New History

Boaz Dvir Author Of Saving Israel: The Unknown Story of Smuggling Weapons and Winning a Nationā€™s Independence

From my list on 21st century nonfiction about the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started conducting primary research about the Holocaust in the 1990s, when I spent a week interviewing my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and a pious Hasid, about his life. Fascinated with the survival of his faith, I applied for and received a grant from the Religion News Service to explore spiritual aspects of the Holocaust. I also sought to answer my sabaā€™s question: How did Israelis end up fighting their 1948 War of Independence with Nazi weapons such as the Mauser he had received? I answered it in the 2015 PBS documentary I directed and produced, A Wing and a Prayer, and the 2020 nonfiction book I wrote, Saving Israel.

Boaz's book list on 21st century nonfiction about the Holocaust

Boaz Dvir Why did Boaz love this book?

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, Iā€™m sometimes asked to recommend books about the Third Reichā€™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 Holocaustā€™s origins and unfolding, from Hitlerā€™s novice-Nazi days to the Alliesā€™ 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 Germanyā€™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 Reesā€™ can clue us into andā€¦

By Laurence Rees,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Holocaust as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER AND THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE ACCOUNT FOR 30 YEARS.

'By far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development' Antony Beevor

'Groundbreaking. You might have thought that we know everything there is to know about the Holocaust but this book proves there is much more' Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

Two fundamental questions about the Holocaust must be asked:

How did it happen? And why?

More completely than any other single work of history yet published, Laurence Rees'sā€¦


Book cover of Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis
Book cover of School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis
Book cover of Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows

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Interested in Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust, and Nazi Germany?

The Holocaust 426 books
Nazi Germany 161 books