8 Books to Honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day Written by Holocaust Survivors
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate the 11 million victims of the Holocaust — the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of millions (including but not limited to Jewish, Roma, Slavic, queer, and disabled people) by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.
We honor those who were murdered and those who survived by ensuring that the memories of the lives lost are never forgotten and the stories of survivors are told again and again.
Night by Elie Wiesel
Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945.
An Underground Life by Gad Beck
That a Jew living in Nazi Berlin survived the Holocaust at all is surprising. That he was a homosexual and a teenage leader in the resistance and yet survived is amazing. But that he has written about it so beautifully is truly miraculous. This is Gad Beck’s story.
A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the ‘Forgotten Holocaust by Otto Rosenberg
The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. In this haunting account, Otto shares his story of how a young Sinti boy miraculously survived the unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.
How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live by Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
A heart-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming Holocaust survivor story that demonstrates the power of love to see us through the darkest of time
The Choice by Edith Eger
Edie weaves her remarkable personal journey with the moving stories of those she has helped heal. She explores how we can be imprisoned in our own minds and shows us how to find the key to freedom.
All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein
The story of Gerda Weissmann Klein’s six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops, in 1945, this is her journey.
Return to Auschwitz by Kitty Hart-Moxon
Describes day-to-day life in the Auschwitz prison camp, where, as a teenager, the author and her mother spent eighteen months, until a forced march across Germany ended in liberation
Trap with a Green Fence by Richard Glazar
Richard Glazar's memoir of deportation, escape, and survival. In economical prose, Glazar weaves a description of Treblinka and its operations into his evocation of himself and his fellow prisoners as denizens of an underworld.