RIYL Night

These books are recommended by Oprah's Book Club:

Educate your child, teenager or yourself with additional reading about the Holocaust. These books offer unique insights into the horrors of the Holocaust.

See Also:

• Lessons for Night

• RIYL Holocaust

AGES 8–12

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems by Hana Volavkova (1964)

A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their hopes and fears inside the Terezain Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944.

History - Holocaust (Random House/Schocken)

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry (1989)

A 10-year-old Danish girl's bravery is tested when her best friend is threatened by Nazis in 1943.

Juvenile Fiction: Historical - Holocaust (McDougal Littel/Houghton Mifflin Company)

Hide and Seek by Ida Vos (1991)

A young Jewish girl relates her experience of the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War II…the separation, the hiding, and the fear both during and after the war.

Juvenile Fiction (Puffin)

The Shadow Children by Steven Schnur (1994)

While spending the summer on his grandfather's farm in the French countryside, 11-year-old Etienne discovers a secret dating back to World War II and encounters the ghosts of Jewish children.

Juvenile Fiction: Historical - Holocaust (Harper Collins)

One Yellow Daffodil: A Hannukah Story by David A. Adler (1995)

This picture book, beautiful both in its art and its story, is about a Holocaust survivor who has lost his faith, but begins to regain it years later.

Juvenile Fiction: Holidays and Festivals (Voyager Books)

AGES 12 AND UP

Dawn by Elie Wiesel (2006)

Two men wait through the night in Palestine. One is a captured English officer. The other is Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter whose assignment is to kill the officer. As a survivor of the Nazi death camps, can Elisha commit cold-blooded murder?

Fiction (Hill and Wang)

Day by Elie Wiesel (2006)

Day was the original title of the novel initially published in English as The Accident (1962). The powerful conclusion to the author's classic trilogy of Holocaust literature, which includes Night and Dawn, begins when a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi.

Fiction (Hill and Wang)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

The journal of a Jewish girl in her early teens describes both the joys and torments of daily life, as well as typical adolescent thoughts, throughout two years spent in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

History - Holocaust (Random House)

Maus I and II: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1986)

These Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novels tell 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.

Holocaust Survivors: Biography - Comic books (Pantheon)

Daniel's Story by Carol Matas (1993)

Daniel, whose family suffers as the Nazis rise to power in Germany, describes his imprisonment in a concentration camp and his eventual liberation.

Juvenille Fiction (Scholastic Paperbacks)

All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein (1995)

One woman documents her three-year imprisonment in German work camps and eventual liberation by the U.S. Army and Lt. Kurt Klein, whom she married.

Biography/Autobiography: Historical - Holocaust (Hill and Wang)

ADVANCED READING

All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995) and And the Sea Is Never Full (2000) by Elie Wiesel

From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Elie Wiesel tells his story.

Biography/Autobiography: Historical - Holocaust - Religion (Random House/Schocken Books)

The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman (1945)

Written immediately after WWII, Szpilman's extraordinary true story of how he survived during the war in Warsaw, Poland, during the German occupation was also turned into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Adrien Brody.

Biography/Autobiography: Historical - Holocaust (Picador)

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946)

The chilling, yet inspirational, story of Frankl's struggle to hold on to hope during his three years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps.

Biography/Autobiography: Historical - Holocaust (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster)

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947)

Levi's haunting account of his 10 months in the German death camp Auschwitz is a chronicle of systematic cruelty and miraculous survival.

Biography/Autobiography: Historical - Holocaust (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer (1990)

The complete story of Hitler's empire, written by a famed foreign correspondent and historian.

History - World War (Simon &38; Schuster)

On Burning Ground by Michael Skakun (1999)

At the eve of the Nazi purging of Poland, Michael Skakun's father, Joseph, not only assumed a dangerous array of identities to disguise his Jewish heritage, posing first as a Christian and then joining the Nazi SS.

Biography: Holocaust (St. Martin's Griffin)