Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There are a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Dance
The subject of
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
has been dealt with in
modern dance
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th ...
.
* In 1961,
Anna Sokolow
Anna Sokolow (February 9, 1910, Hartford, Connecticut – March 29, 2000, Manhattan, New York City) was an American dancer and choreographer known for the social justice focus and theatricality of her work, and for her support of the developm ...
, a Jewish-American choreographer, created her piece ''Dreams'', an attempt to deal with her
night terrors
Night terror, also called sleep terror, is a sleep disorder causing feelings of panic or dread and typically occurring during the first hours of stage 3–4 non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and lasting for 1 to 10 minutes. It can last long ...
; eventually it became an aide-mémoire to the horrors of the Holocaust.
* Rami Be'er tries to illustrate the feeling of being trapped in ''Aide Memoire'' (
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
title: ''Zichron Dvarim''). The dancers move ecstatically, trapped in their personal turmoil, spinning while swinging their arms and legs, and banging on the wall; some are crucified, unable to move freely on the stage. This piece was performed by the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company.
*
Tatiana Navka
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Navka (russian: Татьяна Александровна Навка; born 13 April 1975) is a Russian former competitive ice dancer and wife of Dmitry Peskov. With her dance partner Roman Kostomarov, she is the 2006 Olymp ...
caused controversy when she and her dancing partner, Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in the Russian version of '' Dancing on Ice'' dressed as
concentration camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...
prisoners.
Film
The Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
has been the subject of many films, such as ''
Night and Fog
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
'' (1955), ''
The Pawnbroker
''The Pawnbroker'' (1961) is a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant which tells the story of Sol Nazerman, a concentration camp survivor who suffers flashbacks of his past Nazi imprisonment as he tries to cope with his daily life operating a pawn sh ...
'' (1964), ''
The Sorrow and the Pity
''The Sorrow and the Pity'' (french: Le Chagrin et la Pitié) is a two-part 1969 documentary film by Marcel Ophuls about the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. The film uses interviews with a Germ ...
'' (1969), ''
Voyage of the Damned
''Voyage of the Damned'' is a 1976 drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, with an all-star cast featuring Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Lee Grant, Max von Sydow, James Mason, and Malcolm McDowell.
The story was inspired by actual events co ...
'' (1976), ''
Sophie's Choice
''Sophie's Choice'' may refer to:
* ''Sophie's Choice'' (novel), a 1979 novel by American author William Styron
** ''Sophie's Choice'' (film), a 1982 American drama film directed by Alan J. Pakula
** ''Sophie's Choice'' (opera), an opera by the ...
'' (1982), ''
Shoah
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ar ...
Schindler's List
''Schindler's List'' is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 novel ''Schindler's Ark'' by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film f ...
'' (1993), ''
Life Is Beautiful
''Life Is Beautiful'' ( it, La vita è bella, ) is a 1997 Italian comedy drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote the film with Vincenzo Cerami. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, who emplo ...
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
''The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'' is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without ...
'' (2008). A list of hundreds of Holocaust movies is available at the
University of South Florida
The University of South Florida (USF) is a public research university with its main campus located in Tampa, Florida, and other campuses in St. Petersburg and Sarasota. It is one of 12 members of the State University System of Florida. USF i ...
, and the most comprehensive Holocaust-related film database, comprising thousands of films, is available at the
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
Visual Center.
Arguably, the Holocaust film most highly acclaimed by critics and historians alike is
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais (; 3 June 19221 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included ...
's ''
Night and Fog
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
'' (1955), which is harrowingly brutal in its graphic depiction of the events at the camps. Many historians and critics have noted its realistic portrayal of the camps and its lack of the histrionics present in so many other Holocaust films. Renowned film historian
Peter Cowie
Peter Cowie (born 24 December 1939) is a film historian and author of more than thirty books on film. In 1963 he was the founder/publisher and general editor of the annual ''International Film Guide'', a survey of worldwide film production, whi ...
states: "It's a tribute to the clarity and cogency of ''Night and Fog'' that Resnais' masterpiece has not been diminished by time or displaced by longer and more ambitious films on the Holocaust, such as ''
Shoah
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ar ...
'' and ''
Schindler's List
''Schindler's List'' is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 novel ''Schindler's Ark'' by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film f ...
''."
With the ageing population of
Holocaust survivors
Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accep ...
, there has been an increased focus in recent years on preserving the Holocaust memory through
documentaries
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in term ...
. Among the most influential of these is Claude Lanzmann's ''Shoah'' (1985), which attempts to tell the story in a literal manner as possible without dramatization. Reaching the young population (especially in countries where the Holocaust is not part of education programs) is a challenge, as shown in Mumin Shakirov's documentary ''The Holocaust – Is It Wallpaper Paste?'' (2013).
Central European film
The Holocaust has been a particularly important theme in cinema in the Central and Eastern European countries, particularly the cinemas of
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
, both the
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...
. These nations hosted concentration camps or lost substantial portions of their Jewish populations to the
gas chambers
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide.
History ...
and, consequently, the Holocaust and the fate of Central Europe's Jews has haunted the work of many film directors, although certain periods have lent themselves more easily to exploring the subject. Although some directors were inspired by their Jewish roots, other directors, such as Hungary's
Miklós Jancsó
Miklós Jancsó (; 27 September 192131 January 2014) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.
Jancsó achieved international prominence starting in the mid-1960s with works including '' The Round-Up'' (''Szegénylegények'', 1965), '' ...
, have no personal connection to
Judaism
Judaism ( he, ''Yahăḏūṯ'') is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilization of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organized religion in t ...
or the Holocaust and yet have repeatedly returned to explore the topic in their works.
Early films about the Holocaust include Auschwitz survivor
Wanda Jakubowska
Wanda Jakubowska (10 November 1907 – 25 February 1998) was a Polish film director. Although she directed as many as 15 films over 50 years, Jakubowska is best known for her work on the Holocaust. Her 1948 film ''The Last Stage'' was an early an ...
The Long Journey
''The Long Journey'' ( da, Den Lange Rejse) is a series of six novels by Danish author and poet Johannes V. Jensen, appearing between 1908 and 1922. The books deal with the author's theories on evolution, backdropped against a description of hum ...
'' (''Daleká cesta'', Czechoslovakia, 1948). As Central Europe fell under the grip of Stalinism and state control over the film industry increased, works about the Holocaust ceased to be made until the end of the 1950s (although films about the
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
continued to be produced). Among the first films to reintroduce the topic were
Jiří Weiss
Jiří Weiss (29 March 1913 – 9 April 2004) was a Czech film director, screenwriter, writer, playwright and pedagogue.
Life Early life
Jiří Weiss was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Prague. He was named after Czech king Jiří z Poděbrad ...
Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Witold Wajda (; 6 March 1926 – 9 October 2016) was a Polish film and theatre director. Recipient of an Honorary Oscar, the Palme d'Or, as well as Honorary Golden Lion and Honorary Golden Bear Awards, he was a prominent member of the ...
's ''
Samson
Samson (; , '' he, Šīmšōn, label= none'', "man of the sun") was the last of the judges of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Book of Judges (chapters 13 to 16) and one of the last leaders who "judged" Israel before the institution o ...
'' (Poland, 1961).
In the 1960s, a number of Central European films that dealt with the Holocaust, either directly or indirectly, had critical successes internationally. In 1966, the Slovak-language Holocaust drama ''
The Shop on Main Street
''The Shop on Main Street'' ( Czech/ Slovak: ''Obchod na korze''; in the UK ''The Shop on the High Street'') is a 1965 Czechoslovakian film about the Aryanization program during World War II in the Slovak State.
The film was written by Ladislav G ...
'' (''Obchod na korze'', Czechoslovakia, 1965) by
Ján Kadár
Ján Kadár (1 April 1918 – 1 June 1979) was a Hungarian-born Slovak film writer and director of Jewish heritage.
As a filmmaker, he worked in Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Canada. Most of his films were directed in tandem with Elm ...
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes Festival (; french: link=no, Festival de Cannes), until 2003 called the International Film Festival (') and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films o ...
in 1965 and the
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (known as Best Foreign Language Film prior to 2020) is one of the Academy Awards handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is given to a ...
the following year. Another sophisticated Holocaust film from Czechoslovakia is ''Dita Saxova'' (Antonín Moskalyk, 1967).
While some of these films, such as ''Shop on the Main Street'', used a conventional filmmaking style, a significant body of films were bold stylistically and used innovative techniques to dramatize the terror of the period. This included nonlinear narratives and narrative ambiguity, as for example in Andrzej Munk's '' Passenger'' (''Pasażerka'', Poland, 1963) and Jan Němec's '' Diamonds of the Night'' (''Démanty noci'', Czechoslovakia, 1964);
expressionist
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
lighting and staging, as in
Zbyněk Brynych
Zbyněk Brynych (13 June 1927 – 24 August 1995) was a Czech film director and screenwriter. He directed 30 films between 1951 and 1985.
Selected filmography
Czechoslovakia
* '' Suburban Romance'' (1958)
* ''Five in a Million'' (1959)
* ...
's '' The Fifth Horseman is Fear'' (''...a paty jezdec je Strach'', Czechoslovakia, 1964); and grotesquely
black humor
Black comedy, also known as dark comedy, morbid humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discus ...
, as in
Juraj Herz
Juraj Herz (4 September 1934 – 8 April 2018) was a Czechoslovak film director, actor, and scene designer, associated with the Czechoslovak New Wave movement of the 1960s. He is best known for his 1969 horror/black comedy '' The Cremator'', of ...
's '' The Cremator'' (''Spalovač mrtvol'', Czechoslovakia, 1968).
Literature was an important influence on these films, and almost all of the film examples cited in this section were based on novels or short stories. In Czechoslovakia, five stories by
Arnošt Lustig
Arnošt Lustig (; 21 December 1926 – 26 February 2011) was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.
Life and work
Lustig was born in Prague. As a Jewish boy ...
were adapted for the screen in the 1960s, including Němec's '' Diamonds of the Night''.
Although some works, such as Munk's ''The Passenger'' (1963), had disturbing and graphic sequences of the camps, generally these films depicted the moral dilemmas the Holocaust placed ordinary people in and the dehumanizing effects it had on society as a whole, rather than the physical tribulations of individuals actually in the camps. As a result, a body of these Holocaust films were interested in those who collaborated in the Holocaust, either by direct action, as for example in ''The Passenger'' and András Kovács's '' Cold Days'' (''Hideg Napok'', Hungary, 1966), or through passive inaction, as in '' The Fifth Horseman is Fear''.
The 1970s and 1980s were less fruitful times for Central European film generally, and Czechoslovak cinema particularly suffered after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Nevertheless, interesting works on the Holocaust, and more generally the Jewish experience in Central Europe, were sporadically produced in this period, particularly in Hungary. Holocaust films from this time include
Imre Gyöngyössy
Imre Gyöngyössy (25 February 1930 – 1 May 1994) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. His film '' The Revolt of Job'' (1983), which he co-directed with Barna Kabay, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film ...
and
Barna Kabay
Barna Kabay (born 15 August 1948, Budapest) is a Hungarian people, Hungarian film director, screenwriter and film producer. His film ''The Revolt of Job'' (1983), which he co-directed with Imre Gyöngyössy, was nominated for the Academy Award fo ...
's ''
The Revolt of Job
''The Revolt of Job'' ( hu, Jób lázadása) is a 1983 Hungarian film directed by Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Lackó is a Hungarian orphan whom a Jewish couple adopts. ...
Kornblumenblau
''Kornblumenblau'' is a 1989 Polish drama film directed by Leszek Wosiewicz. The film was selected as the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.Margaret Herrick Library, Ac ...
Juraj Herz
Juraj Herz (4 September 1934 – 8 April 2018) was a Czechoslovak film director, actor, and scene designer, associated with the Czechoslovak New Wave movement of the 1960s. He is best known for his 1969 horror/black comedy '' The Cremator'', of ...
's '' Night Caught Up With Me'' (''Zastihla mě noc'', Czechoslovakia, 1986), whose shower scene is thought to be the basis of Steven Spielberg's similar sequence in ''Schindler's List''.
Directors such as
István Szabó
István Szabó (; born 18 February 1938) is a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, and opera director.
Szabó is one of the most notable Hungarian filmmakers and one who has been best known outside the Hungarian-speaking world since the ...
(Hungary) and
Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland (born 28 November 1948) is a Polish film and television director and screenwriter, best known for her political contributions to Polish cinema. She began her career as assistant to directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, ...
(Poland) were able to make films that touched on the Holocaust by working internationally, Szabó with his
Oscar
Oscar, OSCAR, or The Oscar may refer to:
People
* Oscar (given name), an Irish- and English-language name also used in other languages; the article includes the names Oskar, Oskari, Oszkár, Óscar, and other forms.
* Oscar (Irish mythology) ...
-winning ''
Mephisto
Mephisto or Mephistopheles is one of the chief demons of German literary tradition.
Mephisto or Mephistopheles may also refer to:
Film and television
* ''Méphisto'', a 1931 French film
* Mephisto (1981 film), ''Mephisto'' (1981 film), a German- ...
'' (Germany/Hungary/Austria, 1981) and Holland with her more directly Holocaust-themed ''
Angry Harvest
''Angry Harvest'' (german: Bittere Ernte) is a 1985 West German film directed by Agnieszka Holland. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is based on a novel written by Hermann Field and Stanislaw Mierzenski w ...
'' (''Bittere Ernte'', Germany, 1984). Also worth noting is the East German-Czechoslovak coproduction '' Jacob the Liar'' (''Jakob, der Lügner'', 1975) in German and directed by German director
Frank Beyer
Frank Paul Beyer (; 26 May 1932 – 1 October 2006) was a German film director. In East Germany he was one of the most important film directors, working for the state film monopoly DEFA and directed films that dealt mostly with the Nazi er ...
, but starring the acclaimed Czech actor
Vlastimil Brodský
Vlastimil Brodský (15 December 1920 – 20 April 2002) was a Czech actor. He appeared in more than one hundred films, and is considered a key figure in the postwar development of Czech cinema.
One of his best-known roles was as the title charac ...
. The film was remade in an English-language version in 1999 but did not achieve the scholarly acceptance of the
East German
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
version by Beyer.
A resurgence of interest in Central Europe's Jewish heritage in the post-Communist era has led to a number of more recent features about the Holocaust, such as Wajda's '' Korczak'' (Poland, 1990), Szabó's '' Sunshine'' (Germany/Austria/Canada/Hungary, 1999), and Jan Hřebejk's '' Divided We Fall'' (''Musíme si pomáhat'', Czech Republic, 2001). Both ''Sunshine'' and ''Divided We Fall'' are typical of a trend of recent films from Central Europe that asks questions about integration and how national identity can incorporate minorities.
Generally speaking, these recent films have been far less stylized and subjectivized than their 1960s counterparts. For example, Polish director
Roman Polanski
Raymond Roman Thierry Polański , group=lower-alpha, name=note_a ( né Liebling; 18 August 1933) is a French-Polish film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, tw ...
's '' The Pianist'' (France/Germany/United Kingdom/Poland, 2002) was noted for its emotional economy and restraint, which somewhat surprised some critics given the overwrought style of some of Polanski's previous films and Polanski's personal history as a Holocaust survivor.
Literature
There is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages. Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of studying
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
literature is the language often used in stories or essays; survivor
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works ...
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
:
On many occasions, we survivors of the
Nazi concentration camps
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as con ...
have come to notice how little use words are in describing our experiences... In all of our accounts, verbal or written, one finds expressions such as "indescribable," "inexpressible," "words are not enough," "one would need a language for..." This was, in fact, our daily thought; language is for the description of daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language of this other world, but a language born here.
This type of language is present in many, if not most, of the words by authors presented here.
Accounts of victims and survivors
*
Joaquim Amat-Piniella
Joaquim Amat-Piniella (November 22, 1913 in Manresa – August 3, 1974 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat) was a Catalan writer. He is best known for his semi-autobiographic novel '' K.L. Reich'', based on his experience as a prisoner in the Mauthausen ...
wrote '' K.L. Reich'', in which he describes his time at Mauthausen camp.
* Jean Améry wrote ''At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities''.
*
Bruno Apitz
Bruno Apitz (28 April 1900 – 7 April 1979) was a German writer and a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Life and career
Apitz was born in Leipzig, as the twelfth child of a washer woman. He attended school until he was fourteen, t ...
, an
East German
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
Badenheim 1939
''Badenheim 1939'' is an Israeli novel by Aharon Appelfeld. First published in Hebrew in 1978 as באדנהיים עיר נופש (''Badenhaim `ir nofesh'', 'resort town Badenheim'), it was his first novel to be translated into English, ...
Denis Avey
Denis Avey (11 January 1919 – 16 July 2015) was a British veteran of the Second World War who was held as a prisoner of war at E715, a subcamp of Auschwitz. While there he saved the life of a Jewish prisoner, Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling ciga ...
prisoner of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...
.
* Nonna Bannister wrote ''The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister'', a collection of diary entries and memoirs she wrote before, during, and after her time in a Nazi labor camp.
*
Gad Beck
Gerhard "Gad" Beck (30 June 1923 – 24 June 2012) was an Israeli-German educator, author, activist, resistance member, and survivor of the Holocaust.
Life and career
Gad Beck was born Gerhard Beck in Berlin, Germany, along with twin sister ...
wrote ''An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin''.
*
Jurek Becker
Jurek Becker (, probably 30 September 1937 – 14 March 1997) was a Polish-born German writer, screenwriter and East German dissident. His most famous novel is ''Jacob the Liar'', which has been made into two films. He lived in Łódź during Wo ...
, East German Jewish author, wrote '' Jacob the Liar''.
* Mary Berg wrote ''The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...
''.
*
Pierre Berg
Pierre is a masculine given name. It is a French language, French form of the name Peter (given name), Peter. Pierre originally meant "rock" or "stone" in French (derived from the Greek word πέτρος (''petros'') meaning "stone, rock", via ...
wrote ''Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora''.
*
Hélène Berr
Hélène Berr (27 March 1921 – 10 April 1945) was a French woman of Jewish ancestry and faith, who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France. In France she is considered to be a "French Anne Frank".
Life ...
wrote a diary about experiences in Holocaust that was published as ''The Journal of Hélène Berr''.
*
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born psychologist, scholar, public intellectual and writer who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's wor ...
wrote ''The Informed Heart''.
*
Livia Bitton-Jackson
Livia Bitton-Jackson (February 28, 1931 – May 17, 2023) was an author and a Holocaust survivor. She was born as Elli L. Friedmann in Samorin, Czechoslovakia, She was 13 years old when she, her mother, father, aunt and brother Bubi, were taken ...
wrote ''I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust''.
* Aimé Bonifas wrote ''Prisoner 20-801: A French National in the Nazi Labor Camps'' in the summer of 1945, on his life in
Buchenwald
Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...
Thomas Buergenthal
Thomas Buergenthal (born 11 May 1934, in Ľubochňa, Czechoslovakia, today Slovakia) is a renowned international lawyer, scholar, law school dean, and former judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). He resigned his ICJ post as of 6 S ...
wrote '' A Lucky Child'' about his experiences of Auschwitz as a ten-year-old child.
* Renata Calverley wrote ''Let Me Tell You a Story: One Girl's Escape from the Nazis''.
*
Leon Cohen
Leon Cohen ( el, Λεών Κοέν; born 15 January 1910 in Thessaloniki, Greece and died in August 1989 in Bat Yam, Israel), was a Jewish-Greek survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a member of the ''Sonderkommando'' in Birkenau ...
wrote ''From Greece to Birkenau: The Crematoria Workers' Uprising''.
* Arnold Daghani wrote ''Memories of Mikhailowka: The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor'' and ''The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard''.
* Gusta Davidson Draenger wrote ''Justyna's Narrative'', a diary in which she describes the Jewish resistance in and around the
Kraków Ghetto
The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and ...
.
*
Charlotte Delbo
Charlotte Delbo (10 August 1913 – 1 March 1985) was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.
Biography Early life
...
wrote '' Auschwitz and After'', a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau.
*
Cordelia Edvardson
Cordelia Maria Edvardson (née Langgässer; 1 January 1929 – 29 October 2012) was a German-born Swedish journalist, author and Holocaust survivor. She was the Jerusalem correspondent for '' Svenska Dagbladet'', a Swedish daily newspaper, from 1 ...
Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (, ; 12 June 1929 – )Research by The Anne Frank House in 2015 revealed that Frank may have died in February 1945 rather than in March, as Dutch authorities had long assumed"New research sheds new light on Anne Fra ...
wrote ''
The Diary of a Young Girl
''The Diary of a Young Girl'', also known as ''The Diary of Anne Frank'', is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Neth ...
''.
*
Viktor Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997)
was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is pa ...
wrote ''
Man's Search for Meaning
''Man's Search for Meaning'' is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to ...
''.
* Richard Glazar, who was one of only a small group of survivors of the Treblinka revolt, wrote an autobiographical book titled ''Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in
Treblinka
Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
deportation
Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...
.
* Fanya Gottesfeld Heller wrote ''Love in a World of Sorrow''/''Strange and Unexpected Love'' (both titles used).
* Arek Hersh wrote ''A Detail of History: The Harrowing True Story of a Boy Who Survived the Nazi Holocaust''.
* Magda Herzberger wrote ''Survival'' about her early life, her time in the camps and her reunion with her mother.
* Etty Hillesum wrote ''An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum''.
* Edgar Hilsenrath wrote ''Night'', which describes life and survival in a Jewish ghetto in the Ukraine, and '' The Nazi and the Barber'', which describes the story from the point of view of a SS mass murderer, who later assumes a Jewish identity and escapes to
Israel
Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
.
* Eugene Hollander was a Hungarian who wrote ''From the Hell of the Holocaust: A Survivor's Story''.
* Sidney Iwens wrote ''
How Dark the Heavens
''How Dark the Heavens'' is a memoir written by Sidney Iwens, in which the author recounts the harrowing story of surviving the Holocaust as a Jewish teen pursuant to the German occupation of Lithuania. The book is reminiscent of ''Night'' by Eli ...
''.
* Marie Jalowicz Simon wrote ''Gone to Ground: One Woman's Extraordinary Account of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany''.
*
Hermann Kahan
Herman Kahan (born Chaim Hersh Kahan; 15 February 1926 – 13 February 2020) was a Romanian-born Norwegian businessman, rabbi, author, and Holocaust survivor.
Early life
Kahan was born into an Hasidic Jewish family in Sighet, Romania. Elie ...
wrote ''The Fire and the Light''.
*
Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész (; 9 November 192931 March 2016) was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was ...
wrote ''
Fatelessness
''Fateless'' or ''Fatelessness'' ( hu, Sorstalanság, ) is a novel by Imre Kertész, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for literature, written between 1960 and 1973 and first published in 1975.
The novel is a semi-autobiographical story about a 14- ...
''.
* Ruth Klüger wrote '' Still Alive'', which is a memoir of her experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna and later in the concentration camps of
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination ca ...
, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt.
*
Josef Kohout Josef Kohout (24 January 1915 – 15 March 1994) was an Austrians, Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor, imprisoned for his homosexuality. He is best known for the 1972 book ''Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel'' (''The Men With the Pink Triangle' ...
's account of his imprisonment at
Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoner ...
was published by journalist
Heinz Heger Josef Kohout (24 January 1915 – 15 March 1994) was an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor, imprisoned for his homosexuality. He is best known for the 1972 book ''Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel'' (''The Men With the Pink Triangle''), which ...
as ''
The Men With the Pink Triangle Josef Kohout (24 January 1915 – 15 March 1994) was an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor, imprisoned for his homosexuality. He is best known for the 1972 book ''Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel'' (''The Men With the Pink Triangle''), which w ...
Anatoly Kuznetsov
Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov (russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Кузнецо́в; August 18, 1929, Kiev, USSR – June 13, 1979, London) was a Russian-language Soviet writer who described his experiences in German-occupied Kie ...
Babi Yar
Babi Yar (russian: Ба́бий Яр) or Babyn Yar ( uk, Бабин Яр) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. T ...
massacre.
* Estelle Laughlin wrote ''Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey Out of the Holocaust''.
*
Olga Lengyel Olga Lengyel (19 October 1908 – 15 April 2001) was a Hungarian Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who later wrote about her experiences in her book ''Five Chimneys''. She was the only member of her immediate family to su ...
wrote ''
Five Chimneys
''Five Chimneys'', originally published 1946 in French as ''Souvenirs de l'au-delà'' (''Memoirs from the Beyond''), is the memoir of Olga Lengyel about her time as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.
Background
Olga Lengy ...
'', where she describes her life in Auschwitz–Birkenau and highlights issues of special importance to women.
*
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works ...
wrote ''
If This Is a Man
''If This Is a Man'' ( it, Se questo è un uomo ; United States title: ''Survival in Auschwitz'') is a memoir by Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resis ...
'' and ''
The Truce
''The Truce'' ( it, La tregua), titled ''The Reawakening'' in the US, is a book by the Italian author Primo Levi. It is the sequel to '' If This Is a Man'' and describes the author's experiences from the liberation of Auschwitz ( Monowitz), whi ...
'', which describe his time and Auschwitz and his journey back home as well as ''
The Drowned and the Saved
''The Drowned and the Saved'' ( it, I sommersi e i salvati) is a book of essays by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Au ...
'', which is an attempt at an analytical approach.
*
Victor Lewis
Victor Lewis (born May 20, 1950) is an American jazz drummer, composer, and educator.
Early life
Victor Lewis was born on May 20, 1950 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Richard Lewis, who played saxophone and mother, Camille, a pianist-vocalist ...
wrote ''Hardships and Near-Death Experiences at the Hands of the Nazi SS and
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
''.
*
Leon Leyson
Leon Leyson (born Leib Lejzon; September 15, 1929 – January 12, 2013) was a Polish-American Holocaust survivor and one of the youngest , Jews saved by Oskar Schindler. His posthumously published memoir, ''The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Imp ...
wrote ''The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible… on Schindler's List''.
*
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
Marceline Loridan-Ivens (née Rozenberg; 19 March 1928 – 18 September 2018) was a French writer and film director. Her memoir ''But You Did Not Come Back'' details her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was married to Joris Ivens.
Biography
Ma ...
wrote a memoir ''But You Did Not Come Back'', which details her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
*
Jacques Lusseyran
Jacques Lusseyran (19 September 1924 – 27 July 1971) was a French author and political activist. Blinded at the age of 7, at 17 Lusseyran became a leader in the French resistance against Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1941. He was e ...
wrote the autobiography ''And There Was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance'' about his life before
WWII
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, his work in the resistance, and his experience in Buchenwald concentration camp
*
Arnošt Lustig
Arnošt Lustig (; 21 December 1926 – 26 February 2011) was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust.
Life and work
Lustig was born in Prague. As a Jewish boy ...
wrote ''Night and Hope'' about his life in the
Theresienstadt concentration camp
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination ca ...
.
* wrote ''An Ordinary Camp'' about her time at Ravensbrück subcamp in
Neubrandenburg
Neubrandenburg (lit. ''New Brandenburg'', ) is a city in the southeast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is located on the shore of a lake called Tollensesee and forms the urban centre of the Mecklenburg Lakeland.
The city is famous for its ...
.
* Ruth Minsky Sender has written three memoirs about her experience: '' The Cage'', ''To Life'' and ''Holocaust Lady''.
*
Filip Müller
Filip Müller (3 January 1922 – 9 November 2013) was a Jewish Slovak Holocaust survivor and ''Sonderkommando'' at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp during World War II, where he witnessed the murders of tens of thousand ...
wrote ''Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz'', where he describes his work in the Sonderkommando.
*
Irène Némirovsky
Irène Némirovsky (; 11 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Russian Jewish origin who was born in Kyiv, the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arr ...
wrote '' Suite française'' which portrays life in France between June 1940 and July 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied Paris.
*
Ana Novac Ana Novac (June 21, 1924/1929 – March 31, 2010) was a Romanian-born writer.
She was born Zimra Harsányi in Dej in northern Transylvania and grew up in Oradea (''Nagyvárad''). Novac attended a Jewish school in Miskolc, Hungary. When Nazi Ge ...
wrote ''The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszow.''
*
Miklós Nyiszli
Miklós Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli vo ...
wrote ''Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account'' where he describes his work, which included medical experiments with and
autopsies
An autopsy (post-mortem examination, obduction, necropsy, or autopsia cadaverum) is a surgical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a corpse by dissection to determine the cause, mode, and manner of death or to evaluate any d ...
of other inmates.
*
Henry Orenstein
Henry Orenstein (born Henryk Orenstein; October 13, 1923 – December 14, 2021) was a Polish-born Jewish-American toymaker, professional poker player, entrepreneur and Holocaust survivor who resided in Verona, New Jersey. A survivor of five Na ...
wrote ''I Shall Live: Surviving Against All Odds 1939–1945'', a memoir of his experiences during the Nazi Holocaust and his survival in five concentration camps.
* Boris Pahor wrote '' Necropolis'', which tells the story from the point of view of survivor who is visiting Natzweiler-Struthof camp, twenty years after he was there.
*
Samuel Pisar
Samuel Pisar (March 18, 1929 – July 27, 2015) was a Polish-American lawyer, author, and a Holocaust survivor.
Early life
Pisar was born in Białystok, Poland, to Jewish parents David and Helaina (née Suchowolska) Pisar. His father established ...
wrote ''Of Blood and Hope''.
*
Sam Pivnik
Sam Pivnik (born Szmuel Pivnik; 1 September 1926, Będzin – 30 August 2017, London) was a Holocaust survivor, author and memoirist. He was the second son of Lajb Pivnik, a tailor, and Feigel Pivnik.
As a Jewish family, the Pivniks were forced ...
wrote ''Survivor – Auschwitz, The Death March and My Fight for Freedom''.
*
Schoschana Rabinovici
Schoschana Rabinovici (''née'' Suzanne Weksler; November 14, 1932 – August 2, 2019) was a Holocaust survivor and the author of the memoir ''Dank meiner Mutter'' (1994) which was published in the United States in 1998 under the title ''Thanks to ...
wrote '' Thanks to My Mother'', which gives a detailed view of Jewish life in
Vilnius
Vilnius ( , ; see also other names) is the capital and largest city of Lithuania, with a population of 592,389 (according to the state register) or 625,107 (according to the municipality of Vilnius). The population of Vilnius's functional urb ...
and the
Vilnius Ghetto
The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.
During the approximat ...
, as well as of her life in concentration camps.
*
Chil Rajchman
Chil (Enrique) Meyer Rajchman a.k.a. Henryk Reichman, nom de guerre ''Henryk Ruminowski'' (June 14, 1914 – May 7, 2004) was one of about 70 Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust after participating in the August 2, 1943 revolt at the Tr ...
wrote ''The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir''.
* Tomi Reichental wrote ''I Was a Boy in
Belsen
Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentr ...
''.
*
Emanuel Ringelblum
Emanuel Ringelblum (November 21, 1900 – March 10 (most likely), 1944) was a Polish historian, politician and social worker, known for his ''Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto'', ''Notes on the Refugees in Zbąszyn'' chronicling the deportation of Je ...
wrote ''Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto''.
* Marija Rolnikaitė wrote ''I Must Tell''.
* Eva Schloss wrote ''Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank''.
*
Magda Riederman Schloss
Magda is a feminine given name, sometimes a short form (hypocorism) of names such as Magdalena, which may refer to:
* Magda Apanowicz (born 1985), Canadian actress
* Magda B. Arnold (1903–2002), Czechoslovakian-born American psychologist
* Mag ...
wrote ''We Were Strangers: The Story of Magda Preiss''.
*
Pierre Seel
Pierre Seel (16 August 1923 – 25 November 2005) was a gay Holocaust survivor who was conscripted into the German Army and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his ...
wrote ''I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual'', a memoir of his imprisonment as a homosexual in the Schirmeck-Vorbrück camp and his subsequent deportation.
*
Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún Maura (; 10 December 1923 – 7 June 2011) was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clande ...
's first book, ''
The Cattle Truck
''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...
'', recounts his deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald in fictionalized form.
* Joseph Shupac wrote ''The Dead Years,'' about his time in Majdanek, then Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen.
* Tadeusz Sobolewicz wrote ''But I Survived'', about his life in Auschwitz and five other concentration camps.
* Mieczyslaw Staner wrote ''The Eyewitness'', where he recounts his experience in the
Kraków Ghetto
The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and ...
Władysław Szpilman
Władysław Szpilman (; 5 December 1911 – 6 July 2000) was a Polish pianist and classical composer of Jewish descent. Szpilman is widely known as the central figure in the 2002 Roman Polanski film '' The Pianist'', which was based on Szpilman ...
wrote '' The Pianist'' which tells about the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the 1944
Warsaw Uprising
The Warsaw Uprising ( pl, powstanie warszawskie; german: Warschauer Aufstand) was a major World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led ...
.
* Shlomo Venezia wrote ''Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz''.
*
Felix Weinberg
Felix Jiri Weinberg FRS (2 April 1928 – 5 December 2012) was a Czech physicist. He was Emeritus Professor of Combustion Physics and Distinguished Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
Life
Felix Weinberg was born in the Sudeten part ...
wrote ''Boy 30529: A Memoir''.
* Helga Weiss wrote ''Helga's Diary: A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp''.
*
Gerda Weissmann Klein
Gerda Weissmann Klein (May 8, 1924 – April 3, 2022) was a Polish-born American writer and human rights activist. Her autobiographical account of the Holocaust, ''All but My Life'' (1957), was adapted for the 1995 short film, ''One Survivor Re ...
wrote ''All But My Life'', which is an autobiographical account of the Holocaust.
* wrote ''Death Brigade''/''The Janowska Road'' (both titles are used), where he describes his work as part of
Sonderaktion 1005
' 1005 (, 'Special Action 1005'), also called ''Aktion'' 1005 or ' (, 'Exhumation Action'), was a top-secret Nazi operation conducted from June 1942 to late 1944. The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder ...
, of burning more than 310,000 bodies close by
Janowska concentration camp
Janowska concentration camp ( pl, Janowska, russian: Янов or "Yanov", uk, Янівський табір) was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 194 ...
.
* Alter Wiener wrote ''From A Name to A Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography''.
*
Jankiel Wiernik
Jankiel (Yankel, Yaakov, or Jacob) Wiernik ( he, יעקב ויירניק; 1889–1972) was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was an influential figure in the Treblinka extermination camp resistance. He had been forced to work as a ''Son ...
Night
Night (also described as night time, unconventionally spelled as "nite") is the period of ambient darkness from sunset to sunrise during each 24-hour day, when the Sun is below the horizon. The exact time when night begins and ends depends ...
'' about his deportation to Auschwitz, as well as ''
Dawn
Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of twilight before sunrise. It is recognized by the appearance of indirect sunlight being scattered in Earth's atmosphere, when the centre of the Sun's disc has reached 18° below the observer's hori ...
'' and '' Day''.
* Samuel Willenberg wrote ''Revolt in Treblinka''.
* Miriam Winter wrote ''Trains: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood during and after World War II'', in which she describes her survival of the Holocaust as a "hidden child".
*
Eva Salier
Eva Salier (née Hellendag; 1923 – August 12, 2014) was an artist, author and a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
Early life, imprisonment
She was born on March 26, 1923, in Koblenz to Jewish parents Simon Hellendag (a Dutch merchant) and h ...
wrote ''The Survival of a Spirit'' for teenagers and preteens. It recounts her story and highlights the role of humor as a coping mechanism making note that, "Mad as it may sound, there was a funny side even in Auschwitz".
Texts in other languages
*
Janina Altman
Janina Altman (; 2 January 1931 – 24 July 2022) was a Polish-Israeli chemist, author and a Holocaust survivor.
Life
Janina Hescheles' father, Henryk Hescheles, was a journalist in Lwów and publisher of the Polish-language Zionist periodic ...
wrote ''Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny''. She wrote this when she was 12 years old and recounts her time in
Lwów Ghetto
, location = Lwów, Zamarstynów( German-occupied Poland)
, date = 8 November 1941 to June 1943
, incident_type = Imprisonment, mass shootings, forced labor, starvation, forced abortions and sterilization
, perpetrators =
, pa ...
and
Janowska concentration camp
Janowska concentration camp ( pl, Janowska, russian: Янов or "Yanov", uk, Янівський табір) was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 194 ...
. The book was translated from Polish into German, French, Finnish, Catalan, and Spanish.
* wrote ''Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann''.
* Denise Holstein wrote ''Je ne vous oublierai jamais, mes enfants d'Auschwitz''.
*
Henri Kichka
Henri Kichka (14 April 1926 – 25 April 2020) was a Belgian writer and Holocaust survivor who was one of the leading figures in Holocaust education in Belgium. Kichka was the only member of his family to have survived the deportation of Belgi ...
and
Serge Klarsfeld
Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notab ...
wrote ''Une adolescence perdue dans la nuit des camps''.
* Marga Minco wrote ''Het bittere kruid – een kleine kroniek''.
* André Rogerie wrote ''Vivre c'est vaincre''.
* wrote ''Un in dayn blut zolstu lebn: Tog-bukh 1943–1944''.
* Paul Sobol wrote ''Je me souviens d'Auschwitz – De l'étoile de shérif à la croix de vie''.
Fake survivor accounts
These authors published fictional works as their memoirs and claimed to be Holocaust survivors:
*
Herman Rosenblat
Herman A. Rosenblat ( 1929 – February 5, 2015) was a Polish-born American author, known for writing a fictitious Holocaust memoir titled ''Angel at the Fence'',Rosenblat, Herman (2009) ''Angel at the Fence'' Berkley Hardcover, purporting t ...
wrote a fictitious Holocaust memoir titled ''
Angel at the Fence
''Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived'', written by Herman Rosenblat, was a fictitious Holocaust memoir purporting to tell the true story of the author's reunion with, and marriage to, a girl who had passed him food through ...
Rosemarie Pence
Rosemarie Pence (formerly Hannah Pence; born 1938) is a German-American woman who posed as a child Holocaust survivor from the Dachau Concentration Camp. Pence became the subject of a fake biography titled '' Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics ...
Enric Marco
Enric Marco (12 April 1921 – 21 May 2022) was a Catalonian impostor who claimed to have been a prisoner in Nazi German concentration camps Mauthausen and Flossenbürg in World War II. He was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan governm ...
wrote a made-up story called ''Memoir of Hell''.
*
Donald J. Watt
Donald Joseph Watt (10 August 1918 – 28 May 2000) was an Australian Army soldier and the author of a literary hoax, a fictitious Holocaust memoir entitled ''Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau'', published i ...
is the author of a fictitious Holocaust memoir entitled ''Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier Who Survived Auschwitz-Birkenau''.
Based on accounts of victims and survivors but written by other people
*
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman (; born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel '' Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines ''Arcade'' and '' Ra ...
completed the second and final installment of '' Maus'', his Pulitzer Prize-winning
graphic novel
A graphic novel is a long-form, fictional work of sequential art. The term ''graphic novel'' is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comic scholars and industry ...
in 1991. Through text and illustration, the autobiography retraces his father's steps through the Holocaust along with the residual effects of those events a generation later. According to ''Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide'', '' Maus'' can be seen as a species of oral history, and is very much an autobiography, for the parents "bleed history" into their children.
* Larry Duberstein published ''Five Bullets'' in 2014. Of the novel, which chronicles the life of Duberstein's uncle who escaped Auschwitz and joined the
Soviet partisan
Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The ...
struggle against the German army, historian
Theodore Rosengarten
Theodore Rosengarten (born December 17, 1944) is an American historian.
He graduated from Amherst College in 1966 with a BA, and earned his PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation on Ned Cobb (1885–1973), a former Alabama tenant far ...
wrote, " re people learn about the Holocaust from fiction than from anything else, and readers will learn more from Duberstein's daring, elegant, introspective masterpiece than any other novel I know."
*
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (; born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels ''Everything Is Illuminated'' (2002), ''Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' (2005), ''Here I Am (novel), Here I Am'' (2016), and for his non-fict ...
tells in ''
Everything Is Illuminated
''Everything Is Illuminated'' is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005.
The book's writing and structure recei ...
'' the story of his mother and her village.
*
Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman (born October 7, 1948) is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world.
Education and career
Ackerman received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pen ...
Warsaw Zoo
The Warsaw Zoological Garden, known simply as the Warsaw Zoo ( pl, Miejski Ogród Zoologiczny w Warszawie ), is a scientific zoo located alongside the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland. The zoo covers about in central Warsaw, and sees over 700,000 ...
saved the lives of 300 Jews who had been imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto.
* Fern Schumer Chapman wrote two books about the Holocaust. The first ''Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust – A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past'' is about the author and her mother returning to the village where their family used to live. Her mother was the only one who survived. The second book is ''Is It Night or Day?''.
*
Vasily Grossman
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist.
Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then pa ...
wrote ''The Hell of Treblinka'', describing the liberation by the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army ( Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, afte ...
of the Treblinka extermination camp.
*
Alexander Ramati
Alexander Ramati (December 20, 1921 – February 18, 2006), born David Solomonovich Grinberg,Gypsy Holocaust''.
*
Lucette Lagnado
Lucette Matalon Lagnado (September 19, 1956 – July 10, 2019) was an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist. She was a reporter for ''The Wall Street Journal''.
Biography
Lagnado was born to a Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt. She atten ...
and the Untold Story of the Children of Auschwitz''.
* Sarah Helm wrote ''If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women''.
Accounts of perpetrators
Other famous works are by people who were not themselves victims.
*
Kazimierz Moczarski
Kazimierz Damazy Moczarski (21 July 1907 – 27 September 1975) was a Polish writer and journalist, an officer of the Polish Home Army (''noms de guerre'': Borsuk, Grawer, Maurycy, and Rafał; active in anti-Nazi resistance). Kazimierz Moczar ...
who wrote ''
Conversations with an Executioner
''Conversations with an Executioner'' ( pl, Rozmowy z katem) is a book by Kazimierz Moczarski, a Polish writer and journalist, officer of the Polish Home Army who was active in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. On 11 August 1945, he wa ...
'' about the stories he was told by the SS perpetrator
Jürgen Stroop
Jürgen Stroop (born Josef Stroop, 26 September 1895 – 6 March 1952) was a German SS commander during the Nazi era, who served as SS and Police Leader in occupied Poland and Greece. He led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 19 ...
.
*
Rudolf Höss
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving comm ...
, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, wrote '' Commandant of Auschwitz'' while awaiting execution.
Fictional accounts
The Holocaust has been a common subject in American literature, with authors ranging from
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...
to
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, '' Th ...
addressing it in their works.
* The title character of American author
William Styron
William Clark Styron Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
Styron was best known for his novels, including:
* '' Lie Down in Darkness'' (1951), his acclaimed fi ...
's novel ''
Sophie's Choice
''Sophie's Choice'' may refer to:
* ''Sophie's Choice'' (novel), a 1979 novel by American author William Styron
** ''Sophie's Choice'' (film), a 1982 American drama film directed by Alan J. Pakula
** ''Sophie's Choice'' (opera), an opera by the ...
'' (1979), is a former inmate of Auschwitz who tells the story of her Holocaust experience to the narrator over the course of the novel. It was commercially successful and won the
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors.
The Nat ...
for fiction in 1980.
* In 1991, Martin Amis' novel, '' Time's Arrow'' was published. This book, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, details the life of a Nazi doctor but is told in reverse chronological order, in a narrative that almost seems to cleanse the doctor of his sins he has committed and return to a time before the horrific acts of pure evil that preceded the Nazi regime.
* '' Schindler's Ark'' was published in 1982 by Australian novelist
Thomas Keneally
Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel ''Schindler's Ark'', the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, wh ...
.
* ''
Sarah's Key
''Sarah's Key'' (french: Elle s'appelait Sarah, links=no) is a 2010 French drama film directed and co-written by Gilles Paquet-Brenner. The film is an adaptation of the 2006 novel with the same title by Tatiana de Rosnay.
The film alternates b ...
'' is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay which includes the story of a ten year old Jewish girl, who is arrested with her parents in Paris during the
Vel' d'Hiv Roundup
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup ( ; from french: Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv', an abbreviation of ) was a mass arrest of foreign Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July ...
.
* '' The Reader'' is a novel by German law professor and judge
Bernhard Schlink
Bernhard Schlink (; born 6 July 1944) is a German lawyer, academic, and novelist. He is best known for his novel '' The Reader'', which was first published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. He won the 2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize.
Ear ...
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Biography
Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Belarusian-Jewish parents from Hlusk, ...
and tells the story of three people and their march to and internment in a Nazi concentration camp.
*
Richard Zimler
Richard Zimler (born 1 January 1956 in Roslyn Heights, New York) is a best-selling author. His books, which have earned him a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award, have been published in many c ...
's ''The Warsaw Anagrams'' takes place in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940-41 and is narrated by an
ibbur
Ibbur ( he, עיבור, "pregnancy" or " impregnation" or " incubation"), is one of the transmigration forms of the soul and has similarities with Gilgul neshamot. ''Ibbur'' is always good or positive, while dybbuk ( yi, ), is negative. ''Ibbur'' ...
(ghost). Named 2010 Book of the Year in Portugal, where Zimler has lived since 1990, the novel was described in the
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The ...
in August 2011 as follows: "Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature." Zimler's ''The Seventh Gate'' (2012) explores the Nazi war against disabled people.
Booklist
''Booklist'' is a publication of the American Library Association that provides critical reviews of books and audiovisual materials for all ages. ''Booklist''s primary audience consists of libraries, educators, and booksellers. The magazine is av ...
wrote the following: "Mixing profound reflections on Jewish Mysticism with scenes of elemental yet always tender sensuality, Zimler captures the Nazi era in the most human of terms, devoid of sentimentality but throbbing with life lived passionately in the midst of horror."
* "Stalags" were pocket books that became popular in Israel and whose stories involved lusty female SS officers sexually abusing Nazi camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at
kiosks
Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist in an ...
scenario
In the performing arts, a scenario (, ; ; ) is a synoptical collage of an event or series of actions and events. In the ''commedia dell'arte'', it was an outline of entrances, exits, and action describing the plot of a play, and was literally pi ...
s where
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
wins World War II, includes the Holocaust happening in countries where it did not happen in reality. And, the effects of a slight turn of historic events on other nations is imagined in ''
The Plot Against America
''The Plot Against America'' is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the R ...
'', by
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
where an alleged Nazi sympathizer—Charles A. Lindbergh—defeats FDR for the Presidency in the United States in 1940.
* The effect of the Holocaust on Jews living in other countries is also seen in ''The Museum Guard'' by Howard Norman, which is set in
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia ( ; ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland".
Most of the population are native Eng ...
in 1938 and in which a young half-Jewish woman becomes so obsessed and disturbed with a painting of a "Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam", that she is resolved to go to Amsterdam and "reunite" with the painter, despite all the horrific events occurring in Europe at the time and the consequences that may result.
* A large body of literature has also been established concerning the
Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II.
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
of 1945–1946, a subject which has been continually written about over the years. (See Nuremberg Trials bibliography).
* ''The Invisible Bridge'', written by
Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer (born June 12, 1973) is an American writer and lecturer. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with ...
, tells the story of a young Hungarian-Jewish student who leaves Budapest in 1937 to study architecture in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with a ballet teacher. Both are then caught up in the second world war and struggle to survive.
* '' The Storyteller'' is a novel written by the author
Jodi Picoult
Jodi Lynn Picoult () is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels, accompanying short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 ...
.
* Jenna Blum wrote ''Those Who Save Us'' where she explored how non-Jewish Germans dealt with the Holocaust.
* ''
Skeletons at the Feast
''Skeletons at the Feast'' is a novel by author Chris Bohjalian, published in 2008. It tells the story of a journey in the waning months of World War II concerning the Emmerich family, who flee their beloved home in Prussia and move west to avoid ...
'' is a novel by
Chris Bohjalian
Chris A. Bohjalian ( hy, Քրիս Պոհճալեան) is an Armenian-American novelist and the author of 20 novels, including ''Midwives'' (1997), '' The Sandcastle Girls'' (2012), '' The Guest Room'' (2016), and ''The Flight Attendant'' (2018). ...
and tells the story of a journey of a family in the waning months of World War Two.
* ''
A Scrap of Time and Other Stories
''A Scrap of Time and Other Stories'', written by Ida Fink, is a collection of fictional short stories relating various characters to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Originally written in Polish, it was translated by Madeline Levine and ...
'', written by
Ida Fink
Ida Fink ( he, אידה פינק,
1 November 1921 – 27 September 2011) was a Polish-born Israeli author who wrote about the Holocaust in Polish.
Biography
Ida Fink was born as Ida Landau in Zbaraż, Poland (now Zbarazh, Ukraine) on 1 Nov ...
, is a collection of fictional short stories relating various characters to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.
*''The Lost Shtetl'' (2020), the debut novel of Max Gross, centers on a Jewish shtetl that was spared the Holocaust and the Cold War. It garnered acclaim from book critics and drew comparisons with the novels of
Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon ( ;
born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, DC, he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, gr ...
.
Literature for younger readers
*
Jane Yolen
Jane Hyatt Yolen (born February 11, 1939) is an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 350 books, of which the best known is ''The Devil's Arithmetic'', a Holocaust novella. He ...
's '' The Devil's Arithmetic'' (1988) hurls its protagonist—an American teenage Jewish girl of the 1980s—back in time to the terrifying circumstances of being a young Jewish girl in a Polish
shtetl
A shtetl or shtetel (; yi, שטעטל, translit=shtetl (singular); שטעטלעך, romanized: ''shtetlekh'' (plural)) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before ...
in the 1940s. In her novel '' Briar Rose'' a child finds out that her grandmother was a survivor of the Holocaust and then tries to find the identity and the life of her grandmother.
* Young adult author
John Boyne
John Boyne (born 30 April 1971) is an Irish novelist. He is the author of eleven novels for adults and six novels for younger readers. His novels are published in over 50 languages. His 2006 novel '' The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'' was adapt ...
created an innocent perspective of the Holocaust in ''
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
''The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'' is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without ...
The Book Thief
''The Book Thief'' is a historical fiction novel by the Australian author Markus Zusak, and is his most popular book. Published in 2005, ''The Book Thief'' became an international bestseller and was translated into 63 languages and sold 16 mil ...
'' (2005) is a Holocaust story narrated by
Death
Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...
himself.
* Australian
Morris Gleitzman
Morris Gleitzman (born 9 January 1953) is an English-born Australian author of children's and young adult fiction.Ursula Dubosarsky
Ursula Dubosarsky (born ''Ursula Coleman''; 1961 in Sydney) is an Australian writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, whose work is characterised by a child's vision and comic voice of both clarity and ambiguity. She ha ...
, ''The First Book of Samuel'' (1995) and ''Theodora's Gift'' (2005), are about children living in contemporary Australia in a family of Holocaust survivors.
*
Lois Lowry
Lois Ann Lowry (; née Hammersberg; March 20, 1937) is an American writer. She is the author of several books for children and young adults, including '' The Giver Quartet,'' ''Number the Stars'', and '' Rabble Starkey.'' She is known for writing ...
's book ''
Number the Stars
''Number the Stars'' is a work of historical fiction by the American author Lois Lowry about the escape of a family of Jews from Copenhagen, Denmark, during World War II.
The story centers on 10-year-old Annemarie Johansen, who lives with her ...
'' tells about the escape of a Jewish family from Copenhagen during World War II.
* ''
Milkweed
''Asclepias'' is a genus of herbaceous, perennial, flowering plants known as milkweeds, named for their latex, a milky substance containing cardiac glycosides termed cardenolides, exuded where cells are damaged. Most species are toxic to humans ...
'' is a young adult historical fiction novel by American author
Jerry Spinelli
Jerry Spinelli (born February 1, 1941) is an American writer of children's novels that feature adolescence and early adulthood. His novels include ''Maniac Magee'', '' Stargirl'', and ''Wringer''.
Life
Spinelli was born in Norristown, Penn ...
Carol Matas
Carol Matas is a Canadian writer.
Carol Matas has had more than forty-five books for young people published over several decades, including science fiction, fantasy, historical and contemporary. Her novels often reflect a Jewish perspective, and ...
, telling the story of a young boy and his experiences in the Holocaust.
* ''Hana's Suitcase'' was written by Karen Levine and tells the story of
Hana Brady
Hanička "Hana" Brady (born Hana Bradyová; 16 May 1931 – 23 October 1944) was a Czechoslovak Jewish girl murdered in the gas chambers at German concentration camp at Auschwitz, located in the occupied territory of Poland, during the Holocaus ...
.
* ''Arka Czasu'' is a 2013 young adult novel by Polish author Marcin Szczygielski, telling the story about the escape of a nine-year-old Jewish boy Rafał from Warsaw Ghetto.
Poetry
German philosopher
Theodor Adorno
Theodor is a masculine given name. It is a German form of Theodore. It is also a variant of Teodor.
List of people with the given name Theodor
* Theodor Adorno, (1903–1969), German philosopher
* Theodor Aman, Romanian painter
* Theodor Blue ...
commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", but he later retracted this statement. There are some substantial works dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the work of survivor Paul Celan, which uses inverted syntax and vocabulary in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Celan considered the German language tainted by the Nazis, although he was friends with Nazi sympathizer and philosopher
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th ce ...
.
Poet Charles Reznikoff, in his 1975 book ''Holocaust'', created a work intrinsically respectful of the pitfalls implied by Adorno's statement; in itself both a "defense of poetry" and an acknowledgment of the obscenity of poetical rhetoric relative to atrocity, this book utilizes none of the author's own words, coinages, flourishes, interpretations and judgments: it is a creation solely based on U.S. government records of the
Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II.
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
and English-translated transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Through selection and arrangement of these source materials (the personal testimonies of both survivor victims and perpetrators), and severe editing down to essentials, Reznikoff fulfills a truth-telling function of poetry by laying bare human realities, and horrors, without embellishment, achieving the "poetic" through ordering the immediacy of documented testimony.
In 1998, Northwestern University Press published an anthology, edited by Marguerite M. Striar, entitled ''Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust'', which, in poetry, defends the sentiments of the statement of Adorno, in a section entitled "In Defense of Poetry," and reinforces the need to document for future generations what occurred in those times so as to never forget. The book collects, in poetry by survivors, witnesses, and many other poets—well known and not—remembrances of, and reflections on, the Holocaust, dealing with the subject in other sections chronologically, the poems organized in further sections by topics: "The Beginning: Premonitions and Prophecies," "The Liberation," and "The Aftermath."
Aside from Adorno's opinion, a great deal of poetry has been written about the Holocaust by poets from various backgrounds—survivors (for example, Sonia Schrieber Weitz) and countless others, including well-known poet, William Heyen (author of ''Erika: Poems of the Holocaust,'' ''The Swastika Poems,'' and ''The Shoah Train''), himself a nephew of two men who fought for the Nazis in World War II.
''
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
''I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944'' is a collection of works of art and poetry by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. They were created at ...
'' by Hana Volavkova is a collection of works of art and poetry by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt.
Comparative study
Pinaki Roy offered a comparative study of the different Holocaust novels written in or translated into English. Roy also reread different Holocaust victims' poems translated into English for the elements of suffering and protestations ingrained in them. Elsewhere, Roy explored different aspects of
Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (, ; 12 June 1929 – )Research by The Anne Frank House in 2015 revealed that Frank may have died in February 1945 rather than in March, as Dutch authorities had long assumed"New research sheds new light on Anne Fra ...
's memoir of the Nazi atrocities, one of the more poignant remembrances of the excesses of World War II. Moreover, in his "''Damit wir nicht vergessen!'': a very brief Survey of Select
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
Plays", published in ''English Forum''(4, 2015: 121–41, ), Roy offers a survey and critical estimate of different plays (in
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
, and
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
translation), which deal with the theme of the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
.
Ernestine Schlant has analyzed the Holocaust literature by
West German
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
authors. She discussed literary works by
Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Theodor Böll (; 21 December 1917 – 16 July 1985) was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers, Böll is a recipient of the Georg Büchner Prize (1967) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972). ...
Alexander Kluge
Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932) is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director.
Early life, education and early career
Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Province of Saxony (now Saxony-Anhalt), Germany.
After growing up durin ...
W.G. Sebald
Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the g ...
and others. The so-called ''Väterliteratur'' (novels about fathers) from around 1975 reflected the new generation's exploration of their fathers' (and occasionally mothers') involvement in the Nazi atrocities, and the older generation's generally successful endeavour to pass it under silence. This was often accompanied by a critical portrayal of the new generation's upbringing by authoritarian parents. Jews are usually absent from these narratives, and the new generation tends to appropriate from unmentioned Jews the status of victimhood. One exception, where the absence of the Jew was addressed through the gradual ostracism and disappearance of an elderly Jew in a small town, is Gert Hofmann's ''Veilchenfeld'' (1986).
In 2021
De Gruyter
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature.
History
The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...
published study focused on Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction.
Role-playing game
White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf Publishing was an American roleplaying game and book publisher. The company was founded in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant
The songs that were created during the Holocaust in ghettos, camps, and partisan groups tell the stories of individuals, groups and communities in the Holocaust period and were a source of unity and comfort, and later, of documentation and remembrance.
'' Terezín: The Music 1941–44'' is a set of CDs of music composed by inmates at Terezín concentration camp. It contains chamber music by
Gideon Klein
Gideon Klein (6 December 1919 – c. January 1945) was a Czechoslovakian pianist, classical music composer, educator and organizer of cultural life at Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Life
Klein was born into a Moravian Jewish family in Přer ...
,
Viktor Ullmann
Viktor Ullmann (1 January 1898, in Teschen – 18 October 1944, in KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau) was a Silesia-born Austrian composer, conductor and pianist.
Biography
Viktor Ullmann was born on 1 January 1898 in Těšín (Teschen), which belonged ...
, and Hans Krása, the children's opera Brundibár by Krása, and songs by Ullmann and
Pavel Haas
Pavel Haas (21 June 189917 October 1944) was a Czech composer who was murdered during the Holocaust. He was an exponent of Leoš Janáček's school of composition, and also utilized elements of folk music and jazz. Although his output was not la ...
. The music was composed in 1943 and 1944, and all the composers died in concentration camps in 1944 and 1945. The CDs were released in 1991.
The
massacre
A massacre is the killing of a large number of people or animals, especially those who are not involved in any fighting or have no way of defending themselves. A massacre is generally considered to be morally unacceptable, especially when per ...
of Jews at
Babi Yar
Babi Yar (russian: Ба́бий Яр) or Babyn Yar ( uk, Бабин Яр) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. T ...
inspired a
poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...
written by a Russian poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko ( rus, links=no, 1=Евге́ний Алекса́ндрович Евтуше́нко; 18 July 1933 – 1 April 2017) was a Soviet and Russian poet. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, ...
Mikis Theodorakis
Michail "Mikis" Theodorakis ( el, Μιχαήλ "Μίκης" Θεοδωράκης ; 29 July 1925 – 2 September 2021) was a Greek composer and lyricist credited with over 1,000 works.
He scored for the films ''Zorba the Greek'' (1964), '' Z'' ...
released the ''
Ballad of Mauthausen
The "Mauthausen Trilogy", also known as "The Ballad of Mauthausen" and the "Mauthausen Cantata", is a cycle of four arias with lyrics based on poems written by Greek poet Iakovos Kambanellis, a Mauthausen concentration camp survivor, and music wri ...
'', a cycle of four
aria
In music, an aria ( Italian: ; plural: ''arie'' , or ''arias'' in common usage, diminutive form arietta , plural ariette, or in English simply air) is a self-contained piece for one voice, with or without instrumental or orchestral accompa ...
Mauthausen concentration camp
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria, Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with List of subcamps of Mauthausen, nearly 100 further ...
survivor.
In 1984, Canadian rock band Rush (band), Rush recorded the song "Red Sector A" on the album Grace Under Pressure (Rush album), ''Grace Under Pressure''. The song is particularly notable for its allusions to The Holocaust, inspired by Geddy Lee's memories of his mother's stories about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, where she was held prisoner. One of Lee's solo songs, "Grace to Grace" on the album ''My Favourite Headache'', was also inspired by his mother's Holocaust experiences.
In 1988, Steve Reich composed ''Different Trains'', a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape. In the second movement, Europe — During the War, three Holocaust survivors (identified by Reich as Paul, Rachel, and Rachella) speak about their experiences in Europe during the war, including their Holocaust train, train trips to concentration camps. The third movement, "After the War", features Holocaust survivors talking about the years immediately following World War II.
In 2017, the Swedish melodic death metal band Arch Enemy recorded the song "First Day in Hell" on the album ''Will to Power (Arch Enemy album), Will to Power''. The song was written by the band's lead vocalist, Alissa White-Gluz, who based it on her Jewish grandparents experiences in the concentration camps.
In 2018, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote an article about the song "101 Jerusalem," which chronicles the real-life story of a Jewish boy fleeing Nazism during World War II.
Television
* In the ''Heartbeat (British TV series), Heartbeat'' episode "Out Of The Long, Dark Night", a mysterious woman named Lisa Barnes breaks into the house of married couple Eva and James Knight. She paints a swastika and writes "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" on a wall, which upsets the Jewish Eva. Lisa later returns and attempts to gas Eva to death, but fails. When she is arrested, Lisa reveals that Eva Knight is in reality not Jewish, but a Czechoslovakian nurse and Nazi named Eva Hanacek, who had murdered Lisa's Jewish parents during the Holocaust (Lisa had survived because her parents had sold what they had, and sent the young Lisa to England, before the war). Hanacek had been in charge of examining prisoners, deciding who would be put to hard labour, and who would be sent to their death. If a prisoner could pay Hanacek, she would let them live, but Lisa's parents could not pay, and were killed. Lisa had tried to take the information about Eva Knight to the authorities, but had been dismissed, as Eva Hanacek had been reported to have been killed by Russian bombs in 1945. When confronted by Lisa's allegations, Eva Knight reveals the truth about herself: she had been born Eva Beskova, a Slovacian Jew. Her family was killed by the Nazis, but Eva had been allowed to live. She was young and pretty, and the Nazis had decided that they had a use for her. They sent her to the Russian front, and forced her into a life of prostitution. To prevent any SS-officer from fathering a racially impure child by accident, the Nazis had Eva forcibly sterilized. Eva managed to escape, and came across the dead body of Eva Hanacek, whom she discovered looked like her (and stole Hanacek's identity). Eva Hanacek had Red Cross papers and a lot of money, that allowed Eva Beskova to make it to the British, and escape persecution. Eva's story is confirmed by medical evidence of her sterilization.
* In the ''American Dad!'' episode "Tearjerker (American Dad!), Tearjerker", Roger (American Dad!), Tearjerker (a parody of James Bond villains) has produced the saddest movie of all time: a Holocaust movie, about a mentally handicapped Jewish boy with a cancer-ridden puppy. Audiences all over the world are shown crying their eyes out, with the one exception being Tehran (where the Antisemitism in Islam, Muslim audience find the film hilarous).
* Herbert (Family Guy), Herbert, a recurring character on the animated sitcom ''Family Guy'', is a Holocaust survivor. In the episode "German Guy", Chris Griffin meets and befriends an old German man named Franz Gutentag. Herbert spots the two, and becomes terrified at the sight of Franz. Herbert goes to Chris' parents and tells them that Franz is a Nazism, Nazi SS lieutenant named Franz Schlechtnacht, whom he had met during World War II (while serving in the United States Air Force) after being shot down in his plane. He was then taken to a concentration camp by the Nazis, after he was believed to be gay, that was run by Franz (who decided which prisoners lived, and which were sent to their death), and was forced to undergo hard labor. Chris' parents are reluctant to believe Herbert's story. Chris and his father later discover the truth about Franz, who locks them up in his basement. Finding out about this, Herbert confronts Franz, which result in a physical confrontation and ends with Franz falling to his death.
*Felicity Smoak (Arrowverse), Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), who is one of the main characters of the DC Comics superhero drama television series ''Arrow (TV series), Arrow'' and the love interest and later wife of its titular protagonist Oliver Queen (Arrowverse), Oliver Queen / Green Arrow (Stephen Amell), their daughter List of Arrow characters#Mia Smoak, Mia (Katherine McNamara), and Felicity's mother Donna (Charlotte Ross), are descendants of the Holocaust survivors. In "Crisis on Earth-X", a 2017 4-part crossover episode of ''Supergirl (TV series), Supergirl'', ''Arrow'', ''The Flash (2014 TV series), The Flash'', and ''Legends of Tomorrow, DC's Legends of Tomorrow'', depicts that in a Parallel universes in fiction, parallel universe where the Axis forces won World War II, and that the Holocaust has continued into the 21st century and spread throughout the world. One Jewish concentration camp prisoner in the Nazi-annexed United States is a parallel universe counterpart of Felicity (also portrayed by Rickards), who is saved by her doppelgänger's husband from execution. Another notable prisoner is Ray (Ray Terrill), Ray Terrill (Russell Tovey), who is superhero Ray (comics), The Ray, is arrested for resisting the Nazi regime in addition to his homosexuality.
* Legion (Marvel Comics), David Haller (Dan Stevens), the protagonist of the Marvel Comics, Marvel superhero television series ''Legion (TV series), Legion'', is the son of a Romani Holocaust survivor named Gabrielle Haller, Gabrielle (Stephanie Corneliussen). Flashbacks in the episode "Chapter 22", Charles Xavier (David's father) is shown meeting Gabrielle at a mental hospital, after World War II. Gabrielle had been rescued from the camps, but had lost her entire family and the trauma of the Holocaust had left Gabrielle Catatonia, catatonic. With his telepathy, Charles manages to get her out of that state (and they later got married). In the episode "Chapter 23", the grown David is sent back in time, finds himself in a concentration camp, and encounters Gabrielle as a young woman, during her time as a prisoner in the camp. Upon noticing David, Gabrielle asks David (mistaking her future son for a fellow prisoner) if he is: "Jew or gypsy? Or homosexual?".
Theater
There are many plays related to the Holocaust, for example "The Substance of Fire" by Jon Robin Baitz, "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" by Bertolt Brecht, Jeff Cohen (playwright and theater director), Jeff Cohen's "The Soap Myth", Dea Loher's "Olga's Room", "Cabaret (musical), Cabaret", the stage adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank", "Broken Glass" by Arthur Miller, and "Bent (play), Bent" by Martin Sherman. In 2010 the advisory board of the National Jewish Theater Foundation launched the Holocaust Theater International Initiative, which has three parts: th Holocaust Theater Catalog a digital catalog in the form of a website containing plays from 1933 to the present about the Holocaust that has user specific informative entries, the Holocaust Theater Education (HTE), which is the development of curricula, materials, techniques, and workshops for the primary, secondary, and higher education levels, and the Holocaust Theater Production (HTP), which is the promotion and facilitation of an increased number of live domestic and international productions about the Holocaust, that includes theater works to be recorded for digital access. The Holocaust Theater Catalog, which launched in October 2014, is the first comprehensive archive of theater materials related to the Holocaust; it was created by the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies and the George Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies — both at the University of Miami — and the National Jewish Theater Foundation.
* In 2010, a theater adaptation of Boris Pahor's novel Necropolis, directed by Boris Kobal, was staged in Trieste's Teatro Verdi.
*In 2014 Gal Hurvitz, a young actress and theater artistic director decided to found th Etty Hillesum Israeli Youth Theatre in memory of Etty Hillesum to provide a safe space for youth from underprivileged neighborhoods and backgrounds (Jews, Arabs and Emigrates in Jaffa).
Visual arts
Creating artwork inside the Nazi concentration camps and Nazi ghetto, ghettos was punishable; if found, the person who created it could be killed. The Nazis branded art that portrayed their regime poorly as "horror propaganda". Nonetheless, many people painted and sketched as inhabitants needed a way to bring life into their lives and express their human need to create and be creative. The Nazis found many of the artists' works before the prisoners could complete them.
Works by victims and survivors
* David Olère began to draw at Auschwitz during the last days of the camp. He felt compelled to capture Auschwitz artistically to illustrate the fate of all those that did not survive. He exhibited his work at the State Museum of Les Invalides and the Grand Palais in Paris, at the Jewish Museum in New York City, at the Berkeley Museum, and in Chicago.
* Alice Lok Cahana (1929- ), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, is well known for her artwork dealing with her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen as a teenage inmate. Her piece, ''No Names'', was installed in the Collection of Modern Religious Art, Vatican Museums, Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art. Her work is also exhibited at
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
in Jerusalem and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her art was featured in the 1999 Academy award-winning documentary, The Last Days.
* Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001), a Polish survivor untrained in art, told her story in a series of 36 fabric art pictures that are at once both beautiful and shocking. ''Memories of Survival'' (2005) displays her art along with a narrative by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt.
* While inside the Lodz Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, Mendel Grossman took over 10,000 photographs of the monstrosities he saw there. Grossman secretly took these photos from inside his raincoat using materials taken from the Statistics Department. He was deported to a labor camp in Koenigs Wusterhausen and stayed there until 16 April 1945. Ill and exhausted, he was shot by Nazis during a forced death march, still holding on to his camera but the negatives of his photos were discovered and published in the book ''With a Camera in the Ghetto''. The photos illustrate the sad reality of how the Germans dealt with the Jews.
* German internment camps were much less strict with art. A black, Jewish artist named Josef Nassy created over 200 drawings and paintings while he was at the Laufen Castle (Germany), Laufen and Ilag#Ilag VII Laufen and Tittmoning, Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.
Works with Holocaust as theme
* A number of artists produced pictures of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the months following its liberation, including Leslie Cole (artist), Leslie Cole, Mary Kessell, Sargeant Eric Taylor (one of the camp's liberators), Mervyn Peake, and Doris Zinkeisen.
* In Israel, many additional artists have dealt with the subject of the Holocaust, including the partisan Alexander Bogen, Moshe Gershuni, Joseph (Yoske) Levy, Yigal Tumarkin, and others. Children of survivors have also expressed their personal family stories through various forms of visual art, such as quilting. An exhibition held at
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
in 201 Virtues of Memory highlighted six decades of Holocaust survivors' creativity.
*The Visual artist Yishay Garbasz has devoted a large part of her art career to the inheritance of Traumatic memories as a second generation to the Holocaust. Including her book "In My Mother's Footsteps" she follows her mother's footsteps through the Holocaust as well as many other projects exhibited in many galleries and museums around the world as well as the Busan biennale 2010.
* The pop art painte Dan Groover produced several paintings on the Shoah theme, which were presented in an exhibition in Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem.
* Israel-born artist Judith Weinshall Liberman has created 1,000 paintings and wall hangings, including the Holocaust Wall Hangings, a series of 60 fabric banners illustrating the plight of Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust.
See also
* Bibliography of The Holocaust
* Glossary of Nazi Germany
* Holocaust humor
* List of composers influenced by the Holocaust
* List of books about Nazi Germany
* Nazi exploitation
* Nazi songs
* World War II in art and literature
* Yellow badge
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
Learning about the Holocaust Through Art * Roy, Pinaki. "''Damit Wir Nicht Vergessen!'': A very brief Survey of Select Holocaust Plays". ''English Forum'' (), 4, March 2015: 121–41.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Holocaust In Art And Literature
The Holocaust in popular culture,