Here are 100 books that Reading the Holocaust fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
Alexei Yurchak was part of the last Soviet generation—the last citizens born in the USSR who also lived through its collapse as adults. As the title suggests, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is a profound and poetic work about truth and what we come to accept as real. Yurchak wants to explain the paradox that, while Soviet people knew by the 1970s that their government was telling them almost nothing but untruths, they were still shocked to their core by their country’s demise. What I loved most about the book was Yurchak’s descriptions of ordinary life among his generation (their intriguing taste for the operatic qualities of metal, the elaborate public pranks they staged, the way they treated life like performance art). With pathos and humor in equal measure, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More paints a brilliant portrait of a world that millions of…
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major…
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
For me, the power of both history and anthropology as disciplines of knowledge is their shared capacity for taking a thing you thought you knew and showing you that you didn’t actually know anything about it at all—in fact, you didn’t even know what questions to ask about it. I would be seriously remiss in a list like this if I did not mention the book that first fascinated me, as a historian, with the anthropologist’s way of posing questions. In this towering classic of British social anthropology, Professor Douglas forces us completely to rethink something we actually never think about at all: dirt. But trust me, once you pose the question, “what is dirt?” you can never think about filth (and its structural counterpart, purity) in the same way again.
Is cleanliness next to godliness? What does such a concept really mean? Why does it recur as a universal theme across all societies? And what are the implications for the unclean?
In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas identifies the concern for purity as a key theme at the heart of every society. In lively and lucid prose she explains its relevance for every reader by revealing its wide-ranging impact on our attitudes to society, values, cosmology and knowledge. This book has been hugely influential in many areas of debate - from religion to social theory. With a specially commissioned preface…
As an undergraduate History student, I was told by one of my professors that I thought too much like an anthropologist; as a postgraduate Anthropology student, I was told by another professor that I wrote too much like a historian! At that point, I finally gave up and turned to journalism and fiction writing…though my love for history figures largely in much of what I continue to write and read today.
This is another one that comes down to voice for me: hearing the story of one of the last African slaves to experience the Middle Passage in his own words. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and refocuses the vast and familiar history of the American slave experience to a disarmingly—and powerfully—human scale.
A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God which brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade-illegally smuggled from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview ninety-five-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of…
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 doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
The Anti-Witch is kind of a follow-up to Favret-Saada’s complex and brilliant Deadly Words, in which the author wrestled with the phenomenon of modern witchcraft beliefs in northern France’s Bocage region and tried to get inside the logic of those beliefs. I said modern witchcraft beliefs, because for me as a historian, what Favret-Saada contributed most to my understanding of this phenomenon lay in the way that she insisted on its historicity. That’s a historian’s way of saying that she did not treat witchcraft beliefs as “timeless relics” that some people weirdly “still” believe, but rather as an evolving set of practices and ways of thinking about how the world works, and the place of evil within it.
Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France's most brilliant anthropologists, and The Anti-Witch is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject is blurred - if not erased - The Anti-Witch develops the contours of an anthropology of therapy, while deeply engaging with what it means to be caught in the logic of witchcraft. Through an intimate and provocative sharing of the ethnographic voice with Madame Flora, a "dewitcher," Favret-Saada delivers a critical challenge to some of anthropology's fundamental concepts. Sure to be of interest to practitioners of…
I have always known that my parents survived the Holocaust. I often listened in when they, my aunt, uncle, and their survivor friends would sit and talk of their lives during the Holocaust. I am the past president for the Phoenix Holocaust Survivor’s Association (now called the Phoenix Holocaust Association) and am on its Board and the Chair of its Education Committee. During this year of Covid, I have been instrumental in hosting numerous writers from around the world who have spoken, in Zoom, about their Holocaust writings and research.
No one can truly know what life was like for Jews under the Nazis. We cannot feel the constant terror and inhumanity imposed upon their Jewish victims. We cannot hear their constant pleas, moans, and screams. We cannot smell the stench of filth, sickness, and death. Nevertheless, Joseph Gershowitz manages to take us as close as we can to his suffering in his absolutely riveting first-hand account of life in the Nazi’s concentration camps. On the Borderline of Extermination is a must-read for understanding the cruelty, barbarism, and inhumanity of the Germans and their all too willing helpers.
A true story of strategy and survival as told by Joseph Gershkowitz (AUSCHWITZ HÄFTLING 99310). With this inspiring story of innate knowledge and determination, Mr. Gershkowitz paints a vivid picture of the atrocities of the Holocaust as seen through his eyes. With that, 100% of the proceeds will be split and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in tribute of Joseph Gershkowitz to ensure the memory of the Holocaust is never forgotten & the Women for Women International organization that works to support marginalized women in countries that have been severely affected by conflict and war.
Both my parents were born in Leipzig, Germany and were survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in Upstate New York with stories my mother recounted about her family’s dramatic escape and the many harrowing moments they endured. I was fortunate enough to interview her before her death and to acquire the memoirs of her two sisters. I've always wanted to publish their astonishing story, and I'm thrilled that my readership spans many countries.This book highlights the many individual, family, and village rescuers that saved the lives of my mother’s family. I have stayed connected to the descendants of many of these rescuers and am forever grateful for the risks these heroic people took to save the lives of the Kroch family.
The authors spent three years interviewing 105 rescuers from ten countries to compile this extraordinary portrait of individual rescuers. This large coffee table edition is beautifully illustrated with historical photographs, and color portraits. Each rescuer explains how he or she came to the decision to shift from being a bystander to being a rescuer. By reading their accounts, we are continuing to hold their actions in the front of our minds. We are witnesses to their heroic deeds. Irene Gut Opdyke is also interviewed.
A welcome addition to Holocaust literature, this work presents a series of 49 personal reminiscences of non-Jewish citizens in various European nations who risked their lives to hide resident Jews from the Nazi horror. Most of those interviewed felt their actions were done out of friendship and for people caught in a web of hatred and anti-Semitism. They did not feel that they were acting heroically but that they were doing what was right. Portraits by Block of each of the rescuers accompany the text. These 49 are representative of the 9,295 rescuers honoured at the Yad Vashem in Israel.…
From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my father’s job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I honestly felt my life had more meaning after I first read this book, as it touched on so much that was close to my heart.
I totally identified with the protagonist’s emotional journey: a childhood imbued with a sense of things lost and hidden, which, in adulthood, he tries to quell with erudition before the past erupts and he learns the truth of his tortured origins.
I found it really haunting and more in touch with the truth about the human condition than most books I’ve read. I’ve read it three times, once with my reading group, and I’m sure I’ll read it again.
This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he…
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, didn’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 survivor’s children and grandchildren.
From the minute Glenn Kurtz found a decaying tape of his parents’ trip to Poland in 1938, I was hooked. I’ve imagined being able to glimpse the world my grandparents inhabited in “the Old Country.” And here it was for Kurtz: some of the only film footage of a Jewish world erased by the Holocaust in the last months before it was gone forever.
I was fascinated to follow along with Kurtz as he becomes a detective working to discover who is in the recorded three minutes, where they are, and what they are doing. But that’s just the beginning; as he discovers the past, he makes connections in the present and changes lives in the process.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community, an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the…
When I was a child, I found myself suddenly fascinated by World War II after reading a Classics Illustrated comic that detailed the history of the war. I remember asking myself, “How could this happen? How could Hitler have exerted such control and power?” Years later, I found myself wanting to write a novel about the Holocaust, but I was shamed and awed by the work of those who had lived through it. Despite that, I kept reading about the war and learning its history. The Taster grew out of all the research I’d done over the years.
I have used this book as a reference for all my novels that deal with Nazi Germany. It is a thick, coffee-table-sized book, that, by chance, I found years ago on the “reduced” shelf in a local bookstore. The chronicle isn’t for the faint of heart. It explains the rise of National Socialism and the ensuing Holocaust in graphic words and pictures, and will leave its indelible imagery firmly entrenched in your memory. It takes you from the roots of the Holocaust to its disturbing aftermath, years after the war.
The Holocaust Chronicle, written and fact-checked by top scholars, recounts the long, complex, anguishing story of the most terrible crime of the 20th century.
The mission of The Holocaust Chronicle is to report the facts, clearly and free of bias or agenda.
The 3000-item timeline of Holocaust-related events is unprecedented in its scope and ambition and detailed caption-text is rich with facts and human interest.
Featured are more than 2000 photographs selected after intensive research in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as other archives and private…
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 medical…
Adena Astrowsky is the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors. Her grandmother often spoke to her about her experiences during the Holocaust, which had a profound impact on her life. She continues to honor her grandmother's life by speaking about her grandmother’s survival and lessons learned from the Holocaust.
A beautifully written and compelling true story about the author’s heroine, her mother. The memoir shares with the reader the unspeakable horrors and tragic times that her mother lived through and witnessed – and of course, the impact of those events on the author, herself. The book is a testament to persistence, hope, and strength.
With the Nazi occupation of Kovno (Lithuania), her life changed forever. Zlata Santocki Sidrer was Jewish, but she survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Gone was her normal life and her teenage dream of becoming a doctor. Instead, she witnessed untold deprivations, massacres, imprisonment, hunger and slave labor before being transported to the Stutthof Concentration Camp. Her story of the death march is a testament to her fighting spirit and the limits of human endurance. Yet the challenges did not end with liberation.
Lovingly compiled from recorded interviews and researched by her eldest daughter, Ettie, this is an account of…
