The Concentration Camps

This short autobiographical novel is Wiesel’s rendering of his terrifying experiences as a teenager at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Nazi death camps. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel graphically describes his witnessing the death of his father, his innocence, and his God.

This is a collection of drawings and poems that were done by children who grew up in the Terezin Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia between 1942 and 1944. The terror, the pleas for rescue, and the reflections of beliefs and values of these children who lived during World War II are vividly captured.

In this graphic novel, Spiegelman writes of his father’s struggle as a Jew in Poland during World War II. In comic book form, the Jews are depicted as mice, the Nazis as cats, and those who side with the Nazis are pigs. Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for this work.

This is the memoir of a Nazi Holocaust survivor. This grandmother speaks from her experiences in the Lodz ghetto in Poland and Auschwitz when she was a teenager. Riva Minska vividly shares how the Nazis destroyed her family, her community, and her way of life and tells how she managed to survive the death camps of World War II.

Drawn from the author’s own experiences, this is the moving story of a young Jewish girl, Rosemarie Brenner, and her experiences in a concentration camp during World War II.

This ALA Best Book for Young Adults is the true, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable story of the author’s experiences at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The reader will be shocked by the atrocities and the horror that she faced but will be moved by her courage and willpower to survive.

Little did Gerda know that her father’s insistence that she wear her hiking boots one hot, summer day would be her salvation from death. Gerda was able to see good even in the darkest of moments while struggling to survive in several concentration and slave labor camps. From January through April 1945, it was those boots that saved her from the cold during a brutal, 300-mile death march from a labor camp in western Germany to Czechoslovakia where she was the only one of 120 women who survived.

As a youth, Kertesz spent one year in Auschwitz and so develops this novel about a 14-year-old Hungarian boy’s ability to see beauty even in a horrific concentration camp. Publisher’s Weekly called its prequel Fateless one of the best 50 books in 1992 and this one won him a Nobel Prize.

Rachek always begs her Grandmother Oma to tell the story of Oma’s two lives: the one before American and the one after. The first part recounts her marriage prior to World War I and then her family’s move from Poland to Germany to seek safety. Ironically, two of her three daughters spent time in concentration camps but all survived and were reunited in the United States. The illustrations really add to readers’ understanding of this horrible time in history.

Livia Bitton-Jackson a.ka. Elli Friedmann, was only 13 years old when the Nazis invaded Hungary. She recounts her struggle to survive with her mother, first in the ghetto, then in the Plaszow Concentration Camp (the one shown in Stephen Spielberg movie, Schindler’s List), and then while working in a factory in Augsburg.

This posthumously published memoir tells of young Sara’s resistance to anti-Semitism while growing up in Romania. For a while, she was able to escape the Nazis by her blonde hair and blue eyes but eventually was caught and sent to Ravensbruck, a German concentration camp for female prisoners.

Alicia was only 13 years old when she began saving Jewish lives in war-ravaged Poland. In this nonfiction account of the Holocaust, Alicia recalls how she stood on her brother’s grave and vowed she would tell his story.

Through moving photographs from the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, Israel, archivist Chana Byers Abells has created an unforgettable essay about the children who lived and died during the Holocaust. While it is a story of death and loss, it is also a story of courage and endurance, a story to be shared with today’s children.

In this historical fiction novel, 12-year-old Hannah find herself transported back in time. As she experiences the horrific events of the Holocaust that were often recounted by her grandparents, Hannah finds new reasons to embrace her family and culture.