The Best Holocaust History Books 2025

1. The Literature of Destruction : Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, Used [Paperback]

David Roskies, in one hundred powerful selections, presents the two-thousand year history of Jewish responses to castastrophe. The cyclical nature of violent regimes and their overthrow is delineated in these recurring images of sin, martyrdom, and retribution that have sustained the Jewish people despite pogroms, massacres, and expulsions -- from the destruction of the First Temple through the Holocaust to the eventual return to their homeland.

The Literature of Destruction : Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, Used [Paperback]

2. Fiet's Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Used [Hardcover]

In this important new addition to the literature of World War II, Alison Leslie Gold links together the harrowing yet ultimately inspiring personal accounts of individuals who lived through this dark period in human history. Meditating on such themes as kindness, love, and art, their stories shed light upon the various forces that gave people the strength and courage to survive. From the story of a young Jewish woman who defied death to keep a promise she made to her dead mother to protect her baby sister, to the story of a young Berlin boy, the son of a Nazi, who separated from his father to discover a lifelong passion for the theater, Fiet's Vase and Other Stories of Survival uncovers the glowing sparks of hope and human kindness that carried people through these tragic times.

Fiet's Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Used [Hardcover]

3. Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. This rare account from a survivor of Gypsy concentration camps during World War II relates how German Sinto Walter Winter was discharged from the German navy in 1943 on racial grounds and was deported to Auschwitz with his brother and sister. The atrocities he witnessed, including the death of his wife and unborn child, are told in stark, unflinching detail. As well as reporting horrific persecutions, Winter recalls moments of personal bravery in which he beat up an SS guard and confronted the notorious Dr. Mengele to request extra rations for starving Sinti children on his block. As the Gypsy culture is generally predisposed not to dwell on the past, this memoir tells a rare story infused with a quiet hopefulness that suggests Winter retained his spirit, courage, and sense of fairness in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz, Used [Paperback]

4. Another Kind of Witness [Hardcover - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Another Kind of Witness by Bernard F. Stehle

Another Kind of Witness, Used [Hardcover]

5. A Daughter's Gift of Love [Hardcover - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. This story of courage, determination and hope is a powerful and moving memoir that pays tribute to love and devotion and the special bond between a mother and a daughter. Trudi Berger was literally snatched from the flames of the Holocaust. She and her mother were sent to the camps, yet Trudi was saved from death not once but dozens of times--by her will to live, her quick wit, her self-confidence, and especially, her love for her mother. It was this sense of devotion that in the end kept them both alive to see liberation from the camps and a return to life.

A Daughter's Gift of Love, Used [Hardcover]

6. Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends [Hardcover - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero--depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier--and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is as compelling as the fiction. Simon Wiesenthal is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

Simon Wiesenthal : The Life and Legends, Used [Hardcover]

7. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer [Hardcover - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendt s notion of the banality of evil. Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as Manager of the Holocaust, in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders no more, he said, than just a small cog in Adolf Hitler s extermination machine. How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann s own recently discovered written notes as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives. A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust s principal organizers as no other book has done"

Eichmann Before Jerusalem : The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Used [Hardcover]

8. The Night Trilogy: Night/Dawn/Day, Used [Paperback]

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1958, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel writes of their battle for survival and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day. In the short novel Dawn (1960), a young man who has survived World War II and settled in Palestine joins a Jewish underground movement and is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. In Day (previously titled The Accident , 1961), Wiesel questions the limits of conscience: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life despite their memories? Wiesel's trilogy offers insights on mankind's attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

The Night Trilogy: Night/Dawn/Day, Used [Paperback]

9. Our Cherry Tree Still Stands: The Story of Michael Herskovitz, Used [Paperback]

In April 1944, innocent, 15 year-old Miksa was ripped from his home and taken first to a ghetto, and then to three concentration camps. He and his two sisters survived the camps, and another brother served in the army during the war, but Miksa's parents and baby brother all perished in Auschwitz. Read his amazing tale of survival and his journey from the Transcarpathian region to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mike has spoken throughout Pennsylvania as well as in New York. He is a proud father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

Our Cherry Tree Still Stands : The Story of Michael Herskovitz, Used [Paperback]

10. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Gathering two classic memoirs of the Holocaust, Fragments of Isabella and Saving the Fragments, a testament to love and survival traces the epic struggle of Isabella Katz Leitner after she and her family are deported to Auschwitz. Reissue.

Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom, Used [Paperback]