Holocaust Literature for Grades 7–12

Baer, Edith. Walk the Dark Streets. (1998) Describes the experiences of a Jewish girl, her family and friends, in German during the rise and reign of the Nazis.

Barth-Grozinger, Inge. Something Remains. (2006) In 1933, as Hitler becomes Chancellor, twelve-year-old Erich and his family, who are Jewish, find they need to make changes in their everday lives as hatred of the Jews grows.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow. (2005) By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany’s young people. He research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members.

Bat-Ami, Miriam. Two Suns in the Sky. (1999) In 1944, an Update New York teenager named Christine meets and falls in love with Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew living in a refugee camp, despite their parents’ conviction that they do not belong together.

Bennett, Cherie. Anne Frank and Me. (2001) After suffering a concussion while on a class trip to a Holocaust exhibit, Nicole finds herself living the life of a Jewish teenager in Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Bergman, Tamar. Along the Tracks. (1991) Recounts the adventures of a young Jewish boy who is driven from his home by the German invasion, becomes a refugee in the Soviet Union, is separated from his family, and undergoes many hardships before enjoying a normal home again.

Bitton-Jackson, Livia. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust (1999) An intense autobiographical account of a 13-year-old’s sudden introduction to war. When Nazis invaded her Hungarian home, Elli found herself shipped to a concentration camp, where she was selected for work. As one of the few teenage camp inmates, Elli recounts a chilling story of survival.

Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. (2006) Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called “Out-With” in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence.

Chotjewitz, David. Daniel, Half Human: And the Good Nazi. (2004) In 1933, best friends Daniel and Armin admire Hitler, but as anti-Semitism buoys Hitler to power, Daniel learns he is half Jewish, threatening the friendship even as life in their beloved Hamburg, Germany, is becoming nightmarish. Also details Daniel and Armin’s reunion in 1945 in interspersed chapters.

Croci, Pascal. Auschwitz. (2004) The horrors and brutality of the Holocaust are captured in this gripping graphic novel, which follows the story of a couple, Kazik and Cessia, who lose a daughter at Auschwitz and barely survive the concentration camp themselves, in a historical saga based on the reminiscences of actual concentration-camp survivors.

Dillon Eilís. Children of Bach. (1992) A Hungarian Jewish family of talented musicians escapes Nazi persecution during World War II. When a group of Hungarian Jewish children return from school to find that their parents have been taken away by Nazis, they must escape over the mountains to safety in Italy.

Drucker, Malka. Jacob’s Rescue. (1993) In answer to his daughter’s questions, a man recalls the terrifying years of his childhood when a brave Polish couple, Alex and Mela Roslan, hid him and other Jewish children from the Nazis. Based on a true story.

Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. (1995) The “definitive edition” that expresses the thoughts of an adolescent Jewish girl as she hides from the Nazis for two years in an abandoned office building.

Friedman, D. Dina. Escaping into the Night. (2006) Thirteen-year-old Halina Rudowski narrowly escapes the liquidation of the Polish ghetto where she lives. She flees to the forest, where she is taken in by a secret encampment of Jews trying to survive. Based on historical events, this little known forest encampments where thousands of Jews survived through ingenuity and courage.

Gold, Allison. A Special Fate, Chiune Sugihara: Here of the Holocaust. (2000) The Japanese diplomat who used his powers—against the orders of his own government—to assist thousands of Jews in escaping the Nazis in Lithuania.

Greene, Bette. Summer of My German  Soldier. (1973) Sheltering an escaped prisoner of war is the beginning of some shattering experiences for a twelve-year-old girl in Arkansas.

Greif, Jean-Jacques. The Fighter. (2006) Moshe Wisniak, a poor Polish Jew, uses his physical strength and cleverness, plus luck, to help him survive the horrors he is subjected to in the concentration camps of World War II. Based on the life of Moshe Garbarz.

Hillman, Laura. I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: a Memoir of a Schindler’s List Survivor. (2005) The remarkable true story of one young woman’s nightmarish coming-of-age. But it also a story about the surprising possibilities for hope and love in one of history’s most brutal times.

Isaacs, Anne. Torn Thread. (2000) In an attempt to save his daughter’s life, Eva’s father sends her from Poland to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her sister survive the war.

Jenoff, Pam. The Kommandant’s Girl. (2007) Becoming a spy for the resistance after the Nazi’s invade Poland, Emma Bau, taking on a new identity as a gentile, becomes a high-ranking Nazi official’s assistant and, leading a double life, compromises her marriage vows, her safety, and the lives of those she loves for the cause.

Klein, Gerda Weissman. All but My Life. (1957) The unforgettable story of Gerda Weissman Klein’s six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz, Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops—including the man who was to become her husband—in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrible journey.

Laird, Christa. Shadow of the Wall. (1989) Living with his mother and two sisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, Misha is befriended by the director of the orphanage, Dr. Korczak, and finds a purpose to his life when he joins a resistance organization.

Levi, Primo. If Not Now, When? (1985) From 1943 to 1945, a band of Jewish partisans engages in guerilla warfare against the Germans in eastern Europe.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. (1995) In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race” was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. This is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance.

Levitin, Sonia. Room in the Heart. (2003) After German forces occupy Denmark during World War II, fifteen-year-old Julie Weinstein and fifteen-year-old Niels Nelson and their friends and families try to cope with their daily lives, finding various ways to resist the Nazis and, ultimately, to survive.

Lobel, Anita. No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War. (1998) The author, known as an illustrator of children’s books, describes her experiences as a Polish Jew during World War II and for years in Sweden afterwards.

Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. (1989) In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, 10-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

Matas, Carol. After the War. (1996) After being released from Buchenwald at the end of World War II, 15-year-old Ruth joins the underground organization Berihah, and risks her life to lead a group of children across Europe to Palestine.

Matas, Carol. Greater than Angels. (1998) Anna, a teenaged German refugee, relates how she and other Jewish children were cared for by the citizens of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, during the German occupation.

Matas, Carol. In My Enemy’s House. (1999) When German soldiers arrive in Zloczow during World War II, a young Jewish girl must decide whether or not to conceal her identity and work for a Nazi in German in order to survive.

Matas, Carol. The Whirlwind. (2007) In 1941, fourteen-year-old Ben flees Nazi Germany with is family, hoping to find stability in Seattle, but when his new friend John, a Japanese American, is sent to an internment camp, he does not feel safe anywhere.

Murphy, Louise. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel. (2003) A retelling of the classic fairy tale, set in Nazi-occupied Poland, follows two Jewish children, left by their father and stepmother to seek refuge in a dense forest, as they wander the woods until being taken in by Magda, an eccentric old woman.

Newbery, Linda. Sisterland. (2004) When Hilly’s grandmother becomes ill with Alzheimer’s disease, her family is turned upside down by revelations from her life during World War II.

Nolan, Han. If I Should Die Before I Wake. (1994) As Hilary, a Neo-Nazi initiate, lies in a coma, she is transported back to Poland at the onset of World War II into the life of a Jewish teenager.

Oertelt, Henry. An Unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust. (2000) Oertelt, who lived with his older brother and widowed mother in Berlin, had just marked his twelfth birthday when Hitler came to power in January 1933. The author links together a chain of events of facts that saved Oertelt’s life during the Holocaust.

Opdyke, Irene. In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer. (1999) “You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once. One’s first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence.” Irene Gut was just a girl when the war began: seventeen, a Polish patriot, a student nurse, a good Catholic girl. As the war progressed, the soldiers of two countries stripped her of all she loved—her family, her home, her innocence—but the degradations only strengthened her will.

Orgel, Doris. The Devil in Vienna. (1978) Inge, who is Jewish, and Lieselotte, a Catholic with Nazi parents, try to make their friendship outlast the Third Reich.

Orlev, Uri. The Lady with the Hat. (1995) In 1947, seventeen-year-old Yulek, the only member of his immediate family to survive the German concentration camps, joins a group of young Jews preparing to live on a kibbutz in Isrrael, unaware that his aunt living in London is looking for him.

Orlev, Uri. The Man from the Other Side. (1991) Living on the outskirts of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, fourteen-year-old Marek and his grandparents shelter a Jewish man in the days before the Jewish uprising.

Olev, Uri. Run, Boy, Run. (2003) Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.

Pausewang, Gudrun. The Final Journey. (1996) Eleven-year-old Alice and her grandfather have been herded into a crowded cattle-train where the harsh realities of Hitler’s Germany and his treatment of the Jews await them.

Pressler, Mirjam. Malka. (2003) In the winter of 1943, a Polish physician and her older daughter make a dangerous and arduous trek to Hungary while seven-year-old Malka, who they were forced to leave behind when she became ill, fends for herself in a ghetto.

Rosnay, Tatiana de. Sarah’s Key. (2002) On the anniversary of the roundup of Jews by the French police in Paris, Julia is asked to write an article on this dark episode and embarks on an investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah.

Ruby, Lois. Shanghai Shadows. (2006) From 1939 to 1945, a Jewish family struggles to survive in occupied China; young Ilse by remaining optimistic, her older brother by joining a resistance movement, her mother by maintaining connections to the past, and her father by playing the violin that had been his livelihood.

Schur, Maxine. Sacred Shadows. (1997) When her German hometown becomes part of Poland after World War II, Lena, a young German Jew, struggles to come to terms with the anti-Semitism and anti-German hatred that seems to be growing around her.

Spinelli, Jerry. Milkweed. (2003) Captures the hardships and cruelty of life in the ghettos of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation of World War II, through the eyes of a Jewish orphan who must use all his wits and courage to survive unimaginable events and circumstances.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. (1960) An autobiographical narrative, in which the author describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps.

Yolen, Jane. Briar Rose. (1992) Becca’s grandmother tells her that she is a princess, and after her death, Becca investigates her grandmother’s mementos and discovers her harrowing teenage years, including survival in a mass grave and Nazis killing her husband.

Zapruder, Alexandra. Salvaged Pages. (2004) This is a stirring collection of diaries written by young people, ages 12 to 22, during the Holocaust. Some of the writers were refugees, others were hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation.

Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. (2006) Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel—a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.