Book 1
‘Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith.’
Book 2
‘A quiet watchmaker's family in Holland risked everything for the sake of others, and for the love of Christ. Despite the danger and threat of discovery, the ten Boom family courageously offered shelter to persecuted Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Then a trap brought about the family's arrest.’
Book 3
‘This book is about two unlikely friends. One born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution.
This book is about common ground. It is a story of migration, anti-Semitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience.
This book is about the past and the present. It is about the state we're in now and the ways in which we carry our pasts into our futures.’
This book is about homelands.
Book 4
‘Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.’
Book 5
‘One of the most famous accounts of living under the Nazi regime comes from the diary of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Edited by her father Otto H. Frank and German novelist Mirjam Pressler.’
Book 6
‘If This is a Man is one of the earliest and most astute Auschwitz memoirs; The Truce recounts the author’s adventures in the chaos of the immediate post-war period.’
Book 7
‘When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he’d written ‘Good luck and happiness’. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.’
Book 8
‘In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became two of the very first Jews ever known to break out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba's mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.’
