The most recommended books about concentration camps

One of the themes that comes up more and more in my work is how groups of people define and treat other groups of people. This book is considered a children’s book but has the same kind of truth and simplicity I saw in To Kill a Mockingbird because it is told through the eyes of a young child. But underneath, its story is shocking and frightening and one that is historically almost ignored.

All around the world, everyone says, “Never again” will something like the Holocaust, Japanese Internment, Armenian genocide, or Rwandan genocide—I could go on and on—occur. And yet it does because instead of reading and studying history, we are focused on where we rank on a grievance list.

This picture book was inspired by a true story about Henryk, a Jewish boy in WWII Poland. Henryk’s family loved music and enjoyed singing together. They couldn’t afford a piano, so Henryk learned to play Schubert on the harmonica his father had given him. When his parents were arrested by the Nazis, Henryk was deported to Dyhernfurth concentration camp. A Nazi guard heard him playing the harmonica and ordered the boy to play for him. Henryk didn’t want to play for the guard, but he had no choice. Then he found out that he also had another, more important audience: his fellow inmates could hear him play. His music was a gift for them, providing tremendous comfort during a time of despair. 

The text is poetic and powerful, and the illustrations, done in a dark palette, are haunting and exquisite.

When I first read this book, I didn’t know much about Treblinka, and in order to write my book I needed to read as much as I could about the extermination camps. I read Raichman’s memoir in one sitting because his account of surviving Treblinka is so immediate and visual. Whenever I’m asked about books on the Holocaust, I always recommend this one. He describes thousands of innocent people getting off trains, being separated, and then being forced to run naked up the “The Road to Heaven” and into the gas chambers. No other book captures Treblinka as well as this one does. Some 900,000 people died in Treblinka, and nearly all of them were Jewish. Raichman’s account is deeply moving, poignant, and heart-rending.

I like this book because Cohen writes about what happened and what could have happened―if Washington had chosen alternative foreign policies in its relations with the former Soviet Union and Russia. As I argued in Surviving the Millennium, this kind of approach is not “counter-factual” because it explores realistic policy alternatives made at the time that represent the paths not taken.

But sometimes, those alternative paths are actually implemented later in new circumstances, so they are part of the historical record and not “counter” the facts. I believe Cohen is right: The US lost a number of opportunities that could have brought Washington and Moscow into a more positive relationship that would have reduced tensions during the Cold War―and now in preventing the present “second” Cold War.

To ensure we’ll never repeat the Holocaust, we must understand it. One of the most difficult books you may ever read, KL is a comprehensive and impressive history of the Nazis’ camp system. The New York Times called this nearly 900-page work by Nikolaus Wachsmann, a history professor at London University, a work of “prodigious scholarship.”

Time and again, when researching my own book for young readers, I turned to Wachsmann for nuanced detail, impeccable research, and a better understanding of some of the “choiceless choices” faced by Jewish men, women, and children. Not for the faint of heart, but a fitting tribute to those who lost their lives.

As a child, Leon Leyson (originally Lieb Lejzon) and his family of observant Jews moved from rural Poland to Krakow, where they became part of the Jewish ghetto and were eventually sent to Nazi concentration camps. Cruelty and near starvation would have led to death had not Oskar Schindler added them to his employees, first at an enamelware plant and later at an armaments factory.

Lieb had to stand on a box because he was so small. As Leon Leyson, he wrote the book as an older man, long a U.S. citizen, and educator. Through a child’s eyes, the horrors of the camps seem even more surreal. Lieb lost family members, but Schindler’s pragmatism and timely bribery of Nazi officials saved Lieb and many more from the Final Solution. 

The book is so much better than the movie! Amis writes about a community living next to a German concentration camp, and I really liked how he focussed on the differences between the camp commander and an advisor who keeps a critical mind through it all.

I liked to see how people adapt again and again to the most gruesome situations, but also how there are rebels who never will. For me this is one of the best books about the humans behind a war, where reality and fantasy have been mixed very masterfully.

The Eagles were a collection of Japanese American youth interned, with their families, at a relocation camp at the base of Heart Mountain, outside of Cody, Wyoming. In the fall of 1943, they embarked upon an undefeated high school football season, although their triumphs were tempered by the injustice of their families’ incarceration and, ironically, the looming threat of the graduating seniors being drafted into the same military that guarded the perimeter of their camp.  Pearson’s is a disturbing, but ultimately uplifting, look at a dark chapter in America’s history.

This middle grade book takes place during WWII. The story takes the reader from Berlin to Poland, told through the eyes of a young German boy who encounters a Jewish boy on the other side of a tall fence. I loved this book because we who know about the depravity and horror of Auschwitz can see the bleak reality from a perspective of an innocent child: a boy who thinks his thin Jewish friend is dressed in pajamas.

Was it just Japanese Americans who were detained during the war? I found myself asking this question before I started researching this topic. Sadly for me, Russell’s book was not yet published. While there are many books that detail the experiences of Germans and Italians (citizen and nationals) with internment, this book focuses on two young, American-born women—one German American, the other Japanese American—and the trials and tragedy they faced when they were detained and deported to Germany and Japan because their parents were foreign-born and eventually returned to the United States. I normally am skeptical of books described as telling “little-known” or “unknown” stories, but this book truly is an examination of an understudied event in the larger story of wartime panic, prejudice, and discrimination.