Books about the Holocaust for Middle and High School

The Holocaust remains a core part of learning about our collective past. Teaching about the Holocaust through literature enables students to connect with the human experiences behind the historical events, challenging them to confront difficult truths about human behavior in times of crisis.

Sourcing age-appropriate titles that accurately contend with the Holocaust can be difficult—we don’t want to shy away from the horrors that occurred, but neither do we want young adult readers to be emotionally overwhelmed by the subject matter or to come away with oversimplified or inaccurate historical understanding.

Since 1976 Facing History & Ourselves has supported students and teachers around the United States and across the globe in examing the history of the Holocaust with our seminal case study, Holocaust and Human Behavior. We have seen firsthand how a deeper understanding of the Holocaust through our thoughtfully designed and researched curriculum helps students develop the ability to look at the world through an ethical lens, empowering them to make stronger historical connections in their day-to-day life, and inspiring them to be active participants in their school, family, and community.

Holocaust literature curricular materials tend to focus on a handful of widely taught, highly lauded selections such as Elie Wiesel’s Night, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. In this list, we offer 12 less frequently taught titles, both nonfiction and fiction, that invite students to explore a wide range of experiences and perspectives. For ease of reference, the recommended books in this list are broken into suggested age ranges under “Middle School” and “High School” and then further subcategorized into “Nonfiction” and “Fiction.”

Middle School Titles

Somewhere There is Still a Sun: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Michael Gruenbaum with Todd Hasak-Lowy

Nonfiction

Michael “Misha” Gruenbaum enjoyed a carefree childhood playing games and taking walks through Prague with his beloved father. All of that changed forever when the Nazis invaded Prague. The Gruenbaum family was forced to move into the Jewish Ghetto in Prague. Then, after a devastating loss, Michael, his mother, and sister were deported to the Terezin concentration camp.

At Terezin, Misha roomed with forty other boys who became like brothers to him. Life in Terezin was a bizarre, surreal balance—some days were filled with friendship and soccer matches, while others brought mortal terror as the boys waited to hear the names on each new list of who was being sent “to the East.” Those trains were going to Auschwitz. When the day came that his family’s name appeared on a transport list, their survival called for a miracle—one that tied Michael’s fate to a carefully sewn teddy bear, and to his mother’s unshakeable determination to keep her children safe.

The Children of Willesden Lane - Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen

Nonfiction

Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura has a wonderful life in Vienna. But when the Nazis start closing in on the city, life changes irreversibly. Although he has three daughters, Lisa's father is only able to secure one berth on the Kindertransport. The family decide to send Lisa to London so that she may pursue her dreams of a career as a concert pianist. Separated from her beloved family, Lisa bravely endures the trip and a disastrous posting outside London before finding her way to the Willesden Lane Orphanage.

It is in this orphanage that Lisa's story truly comes to life. Her music inspires the other orphanage children, and they, in turn, cheer her on in her efforts to make good on her promise to her family to realize her musical potential. Through hard work and sheer pluck, Lisa wins a scholarship to study piano at the Royal Academy. As she supports herself and studies, she makes a new life for herself and dreams of reconnecting with the family she was forced to leave behind. The resulting tale delivers a message of the power of music to uplift the human spirit and to grant the individual soul endurance, patience, and peace.

The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto by Mary Berg

Nonfiction

This is the first eye-witness account ever published of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Mary Berg was fifteen when the German army poured into Poland in 1939. She survived four years of Nazi terror, and managed to keep a diary throughout.

This astonishing, vivid portrayal of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto ranks with the most significant documents of the Second World War. Mary Berg candidly chronicles not only the daily deprivations and mass deportations, but also the resistance and resilience of the inhabitants, their secret societies, and the youth at the forefront of the fight against Nazi terror.

Above all The Diary of Mary Berg is a uniquely personal story of a life-loving girl’s encounter with unparalleled human suffering, and offers an extraordinary insight into one of the darkest chapters of human history.

Hana’s Suitcase: The Quest to Solve a Holocaust Mystery by Karen Levine

Nonfiction

In March 2000, Fumiko Ishioka, the curator of a small Holocaust education center in Tokyo, received an empty suitcase from the museum at Auschwitz. On the outside, in white paint, were the words “Hana Brady, May 16, 1931, Orphan.”

Fumiko and the children at the center were determined to find out who Hana was and what happened to her all those years ago, leading them to a startling and emotional discovery.

The dual narrative intertwines Fumiko’s international journey to find the truth about Hana Brady’s fate with Hana’s own compelling story of her life in a quiet Czech town, which is shattered by the arrival of the Nazis, tearing apart the family she loves. This suspense-filled work of investigative nonfiction draws in young readers and makes them active participants in the search for Hana’s identity.

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood and Greg Dawson

Nonfiction

When the Germans invade Ukraine, Zhanna, a young Jewish girl, must leave behind her friends, her freedom, and her promising musical future at the world’s top conservatory. With no time to say goodbye, Zhanna, her sister Frina, and their entire family are removed from their home by the Nazis and forced on a long, cold death march. When a guard turns a blind eye, Zhanna flees with nothing more than her musical talent, her beloved sheet music, and her father’s final plea: “I don’t care what you do. Just live.”

This incredible true story in-verse is about sisterhood, survival, and music.

Included is extensive back matter with original letters and photographs, additional information, and materials for further reading.

The Length of a String by Elissa Brent Weissman

Fiction

Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's Black and almost everyone she knows is white.

Then her mom's grandmother—Imani's great-grandma Anna—passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books. It's Anna's diary from 1941, the year she was twelve and fled Nazi-occupied Luxembourg alone, sent by her parents to seek refuge in Brooklyn, New York.

Anna's diary records her journey to America and her new life with an adoptive family of her own. And as Imani reads the diary, she begins to see her family, and her place in it, in a whole new way.

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

Winner of the 1989 National Jewish Book Award

Fiction

Hannah dreads going to her family's Passover Seder—she's tired of hearing her relatives talk about the past. But when she opens the front door to symbolically welcome the prophet Elijah, she's transported to a Polish village in the year 1942. Why is she there, and who is this "Chaya" that everyone seems to think she is? Just as she begins to unravel the mystery, Nazi soldiers come to take everyone in the village away. And only Hannah knows the unspeakable horrors that await.

High School Titles

Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust edited by Alexandra Zapruder

Nonfiction

Winner of the 2002 National Jewish Book Award

"These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader's broken heart for many days and many nights." - Elie Wiesel

This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated.

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.

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal

Nonfiction

You are a prisoner in a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do?

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to—and obtain absolution from—a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?

In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China, and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.

I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson

Nonfiction

It wasn’t long ago that Elli led a normal life that included family, friends, school, and thoughts about boys. A life in which Elli could lie and daydream for hours that she was a beautiful and elegant celebrated poet.

But these adolescent daydreams quickly darken in March 1944, when the Nazis invade Hungary.

First Elli can no longer attend school, have possessions, or talk to her neighbors. Then she and her family are forced to leave their house behind to move into a crowded ghetto, where privacy becomes a luxury of the past and food becomes a scarcity.

Her strong will and faith allow Elli to manage and adjust, but what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. The worst is yet to come.

Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe by Leo Bretholz and Michael Olesker

Nonfiction

Young Leo Bretholz survived the Holocaust by escaping from the Nazis (and others) not once, but seven times during his almost seven-year ordeal crisscrossing war-torn Europe. He leaped from trains, outran police, and hid in attics, cellars, anywhere that offered a few more seconds of safety.

First he swam the River Sauer at the German-Belgian border. Later he climbed the Alps on feet so battered they froze to his socks—only to be turned back at the Swiss border. He crawled out from under the barbed wire of a French holding camp, and hid in a village in the Pyrenees while gendarmes searched it.

And in the dark hours of one November morning, he escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Fiction

When Death has a story to tell, you listen.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist: books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.