Anne Frank’s Diary
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Discoved in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.
- Readers Companion & Discussion Questions for The Diary of a Young Girl
- Lesson: Exploring Anne Frank’s Diary
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation
Adapted by Ari Folman, illustrated by David Polonsky, and authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, this is the first graphic edit ion of The Diary and includes extensive quotation directly from the definitive edition. It remains faithful to the original, while the stunning illustrations interpret and add layers of visual meaning and immediacy to this classic work of Holocaust literature. (Amazon)
Belonging
Nor Krug
Belonging wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next. In this highly inventive visual memoir—equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative—Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong. A wholly original record of a German woman’s struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts.
Maus I & II
Art Spiegelman
The Pulitzer Prize-winning 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. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closerto the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).
More Than Any Child Should Know: A Kindertransport Story of the Holocaust
Paul Regelbrugge and Julia Thompson, Illustrated by Sean Dougherty
What is it like for a child of eight to leave the only home he’s ever known, traveling alone by land and sea to an uncertain future? On the eve of World War II, this was the journey of young Steve Adler. Born in 1930 to a German-Jewish family, Steve was one of the lucky ones: finding refuge from persecution and danger during the Holocaust in England and later the United States. Throughout his adult life, Steve used his story to champion the importance of Holocaust education as a longstanding member of the Holocaust Center for Humanity’s Speakers Bureau.
- Discussion questions & writing prompts: Click Here.
Night
Elie Wiesel
It is 1944. The Jews of Sighet, Hungary are rounded up and driven into Nazi concentration camps. For the next terrible year, young Elie Wiesel experiences the loss of everything he loves — home, friends, family — in an agonizing journey through Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald. The greatest tragedy of our time, told through the eyes of a 15-year old boy.
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It’s now 1943, and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. When the Jews of Denmark are “relocated”, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be one of the family. Soon Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission to save Ellen’s life.
Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust
Alexandra Zapruder
A stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust.
White Bird: A Wonder Story
R.J. Palacio
In R. J. Palacio’s bestselling collection of stories Auggie & Me, which expands on characters in Wonder, readers were introduced to Julian’s grandmother, Grandmère. Here, Palacio makes her graphic novel debut with Grandmère’s heartrending story: how she, a young Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II; how the boy she and her classmates once shunned became her savior and best friend.
The Yellow Star House
Paul V. Regelbrugge
The remarkable story of one boy’s survival in a protected house in Hungary. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, over 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported and, most were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is the story of how one Jewish boy and 400 others were protected in a “yellow star house.” The house was converted into a hospital run by Jewish doctors designed to treat everyone — even their wounded enemies, free of charge. The Jewish residents were ultimately saved in this way by a man who posed as an Arrow Cross officer and risked his own life countless times while over 70,000 Jews were being murdered at the Danube or dying in ghettos. The Yellow Star House is a story of courage, family, hope, rescue and luck.
