Holocaust Books

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

Diane Ackerman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

the New York Times bestseller: a true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

When Germany invaded poland, stuka bombers devastated warsaw—and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.

with her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. 8 pages of illustrations.

Night (Oprah's Book Club)

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 629 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Elie, a brave boy and a survivor 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Night is a book that truly makes you think and feel. What happened to the Jewish people is devastatingly awful.My mom homeschools my siblings and they chose to listen to Night on audio tape. Everyone was enraptured in Elie's story wanting to know what happened to him. I think everyone should read Elie's story or hear it at some point in your life, because it makes you grateful for your own life and because everyone should know what the Germans did to the Jews. That time in history should never be forgotten.

Editorial Review:

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (Audio Editions)

Anne Frank

List Price: $15.95 By: Audio Partners Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $31.97

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Total reviews: 632 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Anne Frank Diary 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

As a young adult I had read articles on the book. I knew the story. I saw the movie made from the book. However, I had never read the book itself.
The experience of reading the words of Anne as she lived for two year in hiding with her family, and others in hiding, was entirely different than just knowing the story. Reading another persons personal words as they were living the life that inspired them to write is a most intimate experience.
In my adult life I am glad to have had the experience of actually reading Anne Frank's words. I recommend the reading of this book to young and mature persons who wish to understand what transpired in our world history on an intimate level.

Editorial Review:

This moving personal document is a life-affirming tribute to the beauty and tenacity of the human spirit in the face of horror. Anne kept track of her thoughts about life, human nature, her relationship with her family, and allowed a tender love story to emerge. Julie Harris' dramatic reading enables the listener to hear Anne Frank as she expresses her doubts, convictions, wonder, and perplexity. Her diary is not a lament, but a song to life, reflecting Anne's belief in the innate goodness of people. 2 cassettes.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

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Total reviews: 288 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Man's Search for Meaning has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the stories of his many patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. "What man actually needs," Frankl writes, "is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task . . . the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."

In the decades since its first publication in 1959, Man's Search for Meaning has become a classic, with more than twelve million copies in print around the world. A 1991 Library of Congress survey that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America. At once a memoir, a meditation, a treatise, and a history, it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.

"One of the great books of our time."
¯Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

"One of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last fifty years."
¯Carl R. Rogers (1959)

"One of the ten most influential books in America."
—Library of Congress/Book-of-the-Month Club Survey of Lifetime Readers


Born in Vienna in 1905, Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. In 1977 a fellow survivor, Joseph Fabry, founded the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. Frankl died in 1997.

Harold S. Kushner is rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and the author of several best-selling books, including When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Living a Life That Matters, and When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough.

William J. Winslade is a philosopher, lawyer, and psychoanalyst who teaches at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the University of Houston Law Center.

The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Art Spiegelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 192 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

At last! Here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker). It now appears as it was originally envisioned by the author: The Complete Maus.

It is 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. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.

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

Art Spiegelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 150 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Poignant 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Maus, A Survivor's Tale is a son's pictorial version of his father's story of survival during WWII.

Both haunting and mesmerizing, sometimes funny and touching, this is a story of perseverance and about what the Jews had to suffer through at the hands of the Nazis in WWII Poland. Spiegleman never sugar-coats what his father had to endure in order to keep he and his wife alive. A true work of art.

Masterpiece! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

As a Jew Living in Israel, holocaust related books are important to read, but it's hard to do it actually. I can remember several holocaust-era semi-biographic novels which are great but those are the exceptions. Most of the books are a bit bothersome though true.
Maus just captured me.I consider it one of the best books I've ever read in my life. It was just breath-taking, adding to that the fact that this was my first graphic novel ever, not to say first comic ever.
I gave it to my wife, her parents, brother and so on. The book came back to me after 6 month. all worn out.
The book touched me in the deepest levels, and was able to do what many other holocaust books tried to do and failed. Take you inside one of the the darkest eras of human kind. You NEED to read to. You have to read it.

Editorial Review:

A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father's story and history itself.

The Hiding Place

Corrie Ten Boom, John Scherrill, Elizabeth Sherrill

Amazon Price: $7.99 List Price: $7.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bantam Books Amazon Marketplace: 232 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 196 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Hiding Place 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is an absolutely fantastic book! This is a lesson in how not to give up. A lesson in how to pursue dreams. A lesson in how to be of help to the less fortunate. A lesson in how to live. A lesson in how to be close to the Father, and always believe in him. This is a must-read!

Editorial Review:

“I pray that God forgive them...”

Corrie Ten Boom stood naked with her older sister Betsie, watching a concentration camp matron beating a prisoner. “Oh, the poor woman,” Corrie cried. “Yes. May God forgive her,” Betsie replied. And, once again, Corrie realized that it was for the souls of the brutal Nazi guards that her sister prayed.

Both woman had been sent to the camp for helping the Jews. Christ’s Spirit and words were their guide; it was His persecuted people they tried to save—at the risk of their own lives; it was His strength that sustained them through times of profound horror.

Here is a book aglow with the glory of God and the courage of a quiet Christian spinster whose life was transformed by it. A story of Christ’s message and the courage woman who listened and lived to pass it along—with joy and triumph!

The Journal of Helene Berr

Helene Berr

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Editorial Review:

A significant contribution to history, The Journal of Hélène Berr is a heart-breaking story of a heroic young woman whose indomitable spirit thrived in the face of prejudice and war. The work of a stunningly talented writer, Hélène's journal is both an intensely moving, intimate document, and a text of astonishing literary accomplishment.

From April 1942 to February 1944, Hélène Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal of her life in Nazi-occupied Paris, seeking refuge from the harsh realities of being a Jew under the Vichy regime. With her friends and fellow students, Hélène plays the violin and escapes the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. Although she comes from a privileged and sophisticated family-her father is a decorated French officer of the First World War and the distinguished director of a large chemical company-she begins to be assailed by anxieties. With difficulty, Hélène keeps to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris, and looking after the children of arrested Jewish families.

Hélène writes of literature, music, love, and the beauty of her city, striving to remain calm and rational even as tragedy closes in. But as anti-Semitic ordinances are passed and rumors of mass exterminations surface, we bear witness to the shift in Hélène's world and inner life.

In 1944, Hélène and her parents were arrested and sent to Drancy. On her twenty-third birthday they were taken by train to Auschwitz, where her parents died within six months. Hélène was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in April 1945, just days before British troops arrived to liberate the camp.

Entrusted by Hélène to her family's longtime cook before she was taken away, Hélène's journal survived as a family heirloom over the years until her niece recently decided to share it with the world. A devastatingly lucid account of one of history's darkest moments, it has become an instant classic. Translated and published in more than fifteen countries, The Journal of Hélène Berr-now available in English for the first time-is a treasure at last found.

The Hiding Place

Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth and John Sherrill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

INCREDIBLY MOVING SAGA OF HEROIC DUTCH FAMILY DURING WW II... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is an absolutely extraordinary book. Never have I read a book in which the spiritual beauty of the author so resonated throughout the story. The purity of heart that manifests itself in this inspiring saga of a heroic, Dutch family in Nazi occupied Holland during World War II is stunningly beautiful.

This is the true story of the Ten Boom family who, during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, upon seeing what was happening to their Jewish neighbors and friends, asked themselves this age old question "If not us,...who; if not now,...when?" They answered it, ultimately at great cost.

The Ten Booms were devoutly Christian and lived a simple life. The patriarch of the family ran a watch shop that had been in his family for a century. Some of the family members, the author among them, worked there, selling and repairing clocks and watches. They also lived in the house in which the shop was located.

When the Nazis occupied their country, the reality of what it meant slowly dawned upon them, as they saw the treatment given to their fellow Dutch citizens of the Jewish faith. Moved by their plight, the author at the age of fifty, together with other members of her family, including their father who was nearly eighty, became active in the Dutch underground.

When it became clear to the Ten Booms that Jews were being targeted for deportation and death, they had a false wall constructed in the author's bedroom, thereby creating a secret room. There, they would hide the terrified Jews who were staying with them, in the event of a Nazi raid upon their home.

Eventually denounced by someone to the Nazis, the Ten Booms were arrested and their home raided and torn apart by the Gestapo, in their search for the Jews they believed to be hiding there. At the time of the raid, the Ten Boom home was filled to capacity with Jews in hiding. So well concealed was the hidden room that had been created by the erection of the false wall, that these poor, terrified Jews managed to escape detection.

The Ten Boom family did not fare so well. It was upon their arrest that they learned first hand of man's inhumanity to man, and their faith was put to a test that they had never dreamt possible. It was faith, however, that sustained the author in what was to be her darkest hour of deepest despair. To find out what happened to the Ten Booms, read this book. It is the story of an incredible family, who had the courage to put their convictions to the test.

This book is a masterpiece. The reader is sure to be captivated by the goodness and spiritual beauty contained within its pages.

Editorial Review:

Corrie ten Boom was a woman admired the world over for her courage, her forgiveness, and her memorable faith. In World War II, she and her family risked their lives to help Jews escape the Nazis, and their reward was a trip to Hitler's concentration camps. But she survived and was released--as a result of a clerical error--and now shares the story of how faith triumphs over evil. For thirty-five years Corrie's dramatic life story, full of timeless virtues, has prepared readers to face their own futures with faith, relying on God's love to overcome, heal, and restore. Now releasing in a thirty-fifth anniversary edition for a new generation of readers, The Hiding Place tells the riveting story of how a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's death camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century.

Searching for Schindler: A memoir

Thomas Keneally

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This is the captivating story behind Schindler’s List, the Booker Prize–winning book and the Academy Award–winning Spielberg film. Keneally tells the tale of the unlikely encounter that propelled him to write about Oskar Schindler and of the impact of his extraordinary account on people around the world.
 
Thomas Keneally met Leopold “Poldek” Pfefferberg, the owner of a Beverly Hills luggage shop, in 1981. Poldek, a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor, had a tale he wanted the world to know. Charming, charismatic, and persistent, he convinced Keneally to relate the incredible story of “the all-drinking, all-screwing, all-black-marketeering Nazi, Oskar Schindler. But to me he was Jesus Christ.”
 
Searching for Schindler is the engrossing chronicle of Keneally’s pursuit of one of history’s most fascinating and paradoxical heroes. Traveling throughout the United States, Germany, Israel, Poland, and Austria, Keneally and Poldek interviewed people who had known Schindler and uncovered their indelible memories of the Holocaust. Keneally’s powerful narrative rose quickly to the top of bestseller lists. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent film adaptation went on to fulfill Poldek’s dream of winning “an Oscar for Oskar.” (Keneally’s anecdotes about Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and other cast members will delight film buffs.)
 
Written with candor and humor, Seaching for Schindler is an intimate look at Keneally’s growth as a writer and the enormous success of his portrait of Oskar Schindler.