7 books that capture grief and loss of the Holocaust

One of the most trying times in the History of the World, The Holocaust was a defining moment for humanity. Even though most of us know it because of the extreme cruelty and goriness that it is synonymous with, only a very few know about the fragile thread of kindness and compassion to which the survivors clung in order to survive. The silver lining in this dark cloud is the writing and documentation that was done by those who survived in order to channel their grief and loss. Many memoirs, books, and fiction writings from the survivors of the Holocaust have made their way to the present and we bring to you the best of those, which expose not just the inhumane side of the event but also the courage and indomitable spirit of the victims.

‘Night’ is based on the true experiences of a holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel who went and lived in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps in 1944-45, the last two years of the Second World War. The book has been translated into nearly thirty languages and was originally written in Yiddish. The author majorly expresses his helplessness as he has to exchange places with his father and take care of him, only to witness him succumb to injuries from a brutal beating.

Pic Credit: Hill and Wang

The author was an Italian Jew who went to Auschwitz with six hundred and fifty others. When he left the camp, only twenty men walked out with him. The book is a documentation of his experiences at the camp, the dehumanization that Jews were subjected to and the extreme form of utilitarianism that the Nazis practised unconscionably. The book, however, also documents the little acts of kindness that the ‘haftlings’ or prisoners managed even in such distraught circumstances, and ultimately made it out of the camps alive.

Pic Credit: The Bodley Head

The camps set up by Nazis sought to demolish the identity of prisoners in every way possible. One of the ways that they used in addition to stripping them off their clothes, hair and belongings was to tattoo a number on their arm so as to relegate their identity to a combination of digits. This book by Heather Morris is a love story that takes place after a tattooist called Lale Sokolov; a Slovakian Jew falls in love with a prisoner girl on whose arm he was tattooing a digit.

Pic Credit: Zaffre

Not set in the camp of Auschwitz, this one is a bit different when it comes to plot and setting. A woodcutter and his wife find a girl child who had been thrown away by her Jewish parents because of the dire circumstances created by the Nazis. When the woodcutter and his wife decide to take the child and raise her despite knowing what the consequences could be, a tale of love and empathy unfolds. A story about redemption and family, this captures the beauty of humanity amidst inhumane conditions.

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Emmanuel Ringleblum was a resident of the Warsaw ghetto, the largest Nazi ghettos established to house Jews. The primary focus of the author in his diaries is children and how not even the most innocent of beings were excepted from atrocities in Hitler’s reign. Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, Ringelblum used to place his notebooks in milk cans and buried them. What later became his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto was retrieved in two parts, the first one in September 1946 and the second one in December 1950.

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Epitomizing the phrase ‘Silver lining’, Eddie Jaku teaches us how to smile even in the gloomiest of times. His book documents all the horrors that he faced at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and at a Nazi death march. After spending seven years of his life under atrocious, malicious people, he finally found his way back to normal life and decided to make each day count by smiling. He now considers himself the ‘happiest man on Earth’ and published his memoir last year, as he turned hundred.

Pic Credit: Macmillan

A son documents the consequences of his Holocaust survivor mother’s trauma in the book. Sonia Reich was born and brought up in Poland from where she began the journey of running and hiding from the Nazis. She finally reached New York at the age of sixteen and worked at factories where she met her husband who himself was a survivor of a death march to the Buchenwald camp. When she packed her bags and fled home one night, it was found that she had late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder because she was pursued as a child for being a Jew. A different perspective from which Holocaust is documented, this book is a poignant commentary on how Holocaust impacted not just camp survivors but anyone and everyone linked remotely to it.

Pic Credit: PublicAffairs

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