10 Best Books About the Holocaust UK 2024 | Anne Frank, Art Spiegelman and More

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Night by Elie Wiesel is one of the most valuable works of the 20th century. Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, Wiesel was sent to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and this book is the account of his harrowing experiences.

One of the most famous books about the Holocaust, Night documents the horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive. One of the most personal and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust, it considers both the darkest side of human nature, but also the power of hope.

One of the best-known accounts of the Jewish experience during the time of The Holocaust, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank has touched the hearts of young people and adults throughout the world. First published over sixty years ago, it is a deeply moving portrait of a teenage girl in hiding with her family in Amsterdam after fleeing Germany.

It is both fascinating and incredibly moving to read the thoughts of Anne, who is an ordinary yet extraordinary young girl. Her diary may end abruptly in 1944 when her family was betrayed, but her memory lives on in the minds of millions of readers worldwide. 

Viktor E. Frankl was a prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war began. Upon becoming an Auschwitz prisoner, he was able to observe the ways in which himself and other coped (or didn't cope) with the experience. 

A bestseller that should be read by all, during his time at Auschwitz, Frankl observed that it was those who gave away their last piece of bread and who comforted others who survived the longest. He felt that this offered proof that everything can be taken away from us, except the ability to choose our attitude to life. 

A writer's search into his family's tragic past during World War II is transformed into a remarkable and enthralling epic, exploring the perilous nature of time and memory. The Lost is a story of a young boy learning about the fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, and has won both the 1996 National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award.

Spanning continents, and a large part of Daniel Mendelsohn's life, the book follows the writer's calling to uncover the truth about his relatives' fate. It's a world-wandering odyssey and as My Jewish Learning describes, "a sad and seductive tale of near-mythic proportions".

Olga Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Transylvania when she was deported to Auschwitz. This experience helped her to obtain work in an infirmary, a job that saved her life. Having lost her husband, parents and two young children to Nazi exterminators, it was only her work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story that kept her fighting for survival.

Five Chimneys is the intimate, day-to-day record of life in the Nazi murder camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.  Brutal and eye-opening, this account shows the dispassionate, business-like nature of those involved in the Holocaust.

When it comes to narratives about the Holocaust, there's nothing quite like MAUS by Art Spiegelman. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a masterpiece in comic book history, MAUS tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his family's history.

MAUS is a tale within a tale, with Vladek's story of survival woven into the author's account of a difficult relationship with his ageing father. In this story, the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice, the simplicity and innocence of which serve to make it all the more shocking and emotionally impactful. 

Under Hitler and Stalin, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed 14 million people within the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. These lands became World War II battlefields. However, none of these 14 million died in combat, instead they were victims of a murderous policy. 

For 12 years around a million people, mainly women, children and the elderly, were murdered every year. In Bloodlands, Yale historian Timothy Snyder explores the intersection between Hitler's Final Solution and Stalin's vicious ideology and his hypothesis is profound yet simple - neither regime could have killed so many without the aiding and abetting of the other.

Based on the writer's two-year incarceration at Auschwitz as a political prisoner, this short story collection is written from the unusual perspective of a non-Jewish Polish journalist. This provides a perspective on life in the concentration camp quite different from other survivor narratives.

In stark and brutal prose, Borowski describes how the will to survive overrides compassion and how prisoners eat, sleep and work just a few yards from where others are murdered. This book is painful to read, and is a piece of essential reading that brings the awful reality of The Holocaust to life.

In his book Rees has created an accessible, chronological account of the murder of six million Jews, exploring how and why it happened and the barbaric methods used to pursue it. This book has been described as the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and the best at explaining its origins and horrifying mentality.

It covers a remarkable amount of ground within its pages, from the anti-Semitism of popular German literature of the 19th century, to Hitler's suicide and surrender of the regime. Rees has distilled 25 years of research into this compelling study, which interweaves narrative history, sound interpretation and the recollections of survivors. 

If you are interested in law, or are looking for a book about the Holocaust in the form of a report, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is considered a journalistic triumph. Arendt was a Political Philosophy University Professor and visiting fellow at the University of Chicago, and this portrayal of the consequences of blind obedience caused a flurry of heated debate upon its publication.

Arendt's report of the trial of German SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition also includes evidence that came to light after the trial and the writer's postscript commenting on the controversy that ensued.