History: The Holocaust: Books about the Holocaust

PRIMO LEVI (1919–1987) was an Italian Jewish author. Levi was born in Turin and trained as a chemist, receiving his degree from the University of Turin three years after Mussolini had barred Jews from higher education. After the German takeover of Italy in 1943, he fled to the north intending to join the partisans but was caught, imprisoned first at the Fossolo camp and in February 1944 sent to Auschwitz. He survived there for ten months, one of the very few on his transport to survive until liberation. After the war he wandered for nine months, including journeys through Soviet Russia, before he got back to Turin. He resumed work as a chemist at the Turin paint factory SIVA where he managed the plant from 1961–74. His first book was Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959) which described the Auschwitz extermination camp, and is regarded as a classic of Holocaust literature. The book was republished in 1961 under the title Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. He described his experience in Auschwitz with meticulous detail, with scientific precision and seemingly without pathos. Levi also wrote several volumes of short stories. He was regarded as one of the great Italian writers of the post-war period and by many as the man who offered the most telling depiction of Auschwitz. No one has described life in Auschwitz more directly, more objectively, with greater scientific precision. In April 1987 he was found dead at the bottom of the stairwell in the apartment building where he was born and where he lived with his wife and mother.

     Berenbaum, M. (2007). Levi, Primo. In M. Berenbaum & F. Skolnik (Eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed., Vol. 12, pp. 691-692). Macmillan Reference USA. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2587512244/GVRL?u=cuny_johnjay&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=31cf84ac

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SIR MARTIN GILBERT  (1936–2015), British historian. His earliest work concerned British foreign policy in the 1930s, which in 1962 brought him into contact with Randolph Churchill. Between 1962 and 1968 he worked as research assistant to Randolph Churchill on the official biography of Sir Winston Churchill. From 1968 Gilbert was the sole author of what became the most voluminous biography ever written, totaling over nine million words and running to six volumes plus an as yet unfinished set of companion volumes containing documents; he also produced a series of major studies on the creation of the State of Israel, the Holocaust, and World War II.

     Cesarani, D. (2007). Gilbert, Sir Martin. In M. Berenbaum & F. Skolnik (Eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed., Vol. 7, p. 597). Macmillan Reference USA. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2587507302/GVRL?u=cuny_johnjay&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=656c57f2

ELIE WIESEL (1928-2016), a survivor of the Holocaust, was a writer, orator, teacher and chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania, on September 30, 1928. When he was 15, Wiesel was taken off with his family to the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, where he remained until January 1945 when, along with thousands of other Jewish prisoners, he was moved to Buchenwald in a forced death march. After the war Wiesel went to France where he completed secondary school, studied at the Sorbonne, and began working as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper. In 1956 he moved to New York to cover the United Nations and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. Wiesel's writings bear witness to his year-long ordeal and to the Jewish tragedy. After the 1960 English language publication of Night, Wiesel wrote more than 35 books. His works established him as the most widely known and admired Holocaust writer. In Night he narrates his own experience as a young boy transported to Auschwitz where suffering and death shattered his faith in both God and humanity. Night is widely considered a classic of Holocaust literature. Wiesel was the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

     Elie Wiesel. (2004). In Encyclopedia of World Biography (2nd ed., Vol. 16, pp. 263-264). Gale. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3404706858/GVRL?u=cuny_johnjay&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=f7d27e94

ANNE FRANK (1929–1945), teenage Holocaust victim who won fame following the posthumous publication of her now famous diary. Through the pages of this book, which she composed during more than two years of hiding from her Nazi persecutors, she has emerged as the preeminent symbol of the innocent but cruelly victimized Jewish child.

After Germany's invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, and especially after a series of harsh anti-Jewish decrees introduced in the following months, the Frank family sought safety by concealing themselves in several rooms in Otto Frank's office building. With four other Jews, they lived in this "Secret Annex" from July 6, 1942, until August 4, 1944, when they were betrayed and arrested. Sent first to Westerbork, a transit camp in Drente, in the north of Holland, they were deported a few weeks later to Auschwitz, the major Nazi death camp in Poland. After a little less than two months in this camp, Anne and Margot were then sent to Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany, where, disease-ridden and emaciated, they died sometime in the early spring of 1945. Of the eight Jews in hiding in the "Secret Annex," only Otto Frank survived. Anne's diary was first published in Dutch in 1947. French and German translations appeared in 1950, and an English translation followed in 1952. Since then, the diary has been translated into some 60 languages and circulated in perhaps as many as 25 million copies.

     Rosenfeld, A. H. (2007). Frank, Anne. In M. Berenbaum & F. Skolnik (Eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 178-179). Macmillan Reference USA. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2587506686/GVRL?u=cuny_johnjay&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=fa4b65ec

ART SPIEGELMAN (1948– ) is a U.S. cartoonist. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, to parents who survived the Holocaust, Spiegelman grew up in Queens, N.Y. His groundbreaking comic books, Maus I and Maus II, tell the story of his parents' wartime ordeal and paint an indelible portrait of the widowed father in old age, an insufferable, maddening survivor, noble despite himself. The first book, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, also known as Maus: My Father Bleeds History, won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The second volume, Maus: And Here My Troubles Began, followed in 1991. Maus, depicting Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs, attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work in the form of comics, including an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.