Remembering

April is Holocaust Remembrance Month.  In honor of this memorial I have chosen books themed around the Holocaust.

Fiction

The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

In the beginning Adolf Hitler's initial political doctrine was filled with hopeful solutions for a country plagued with hunger and devastation post-World War I. Promises of prosperity quickly turn to oppressive new laws including the required participation in the Hitler Youth. Protagonist Helmuth Hübener enters the program with his friends but he quickly begins to question reality behind the regime's invasions of neighboring countries, mistreatment of Jewish citizens, and closely controlled media. He creates an underground newsletter with information gathered from BBC reports using an illegal shortwave radio. As he secretly distributes the flyers throughout the town, his boldness encourages him to gather several accomplices resulting in his arrest, trial, and execution.

Nonfiction

Holocaust by Angela Gluck Wood

This DK presentation, in the classic glossy style,  combined with the eyewitness accounts of Holocaust survivors makes for a sobering and visually compelling work of history.  A wide variety of materials  create a  disturbing timeline of events beginning with Jewish exile from Jerusalem in 70 CE after Roman occupation and ending with modern-day Holocaust denial and the creation of memorials around the world.

Adult Pick

Night by Elie Wiesel

A chilling memoir in which a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that destroyed his family.  Nightmares of the world of the death camps haunt him.  He is plagued by a question: “how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur?”