Oregon Holocaust Memorial Resources
Fiction
Applefield, Aharon. To the Land of the Cattails. New York: Pantheon, 1991. (high school +)
A young man and his mother living in Austria travel eastward across the heart of Europe to the distant land of the mother's childhood. The year is 1938, and the two arrives just as the Jews of the village are being shipped off on a mysterious train onto an unspecified destination.
Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time. New York: Schocken, 1989. (high school +)
The title story in this collection of short stories concerns the way time was measured by Holocaust victims. Other stories describe people in a variety of human situations distorted by the circumstances of the times.
Friedlander, Albert. Out of the Whirlwind. New York: Schocken, 1989. (high school +)
Not all of the entries included in this anthology are fiction. Excerpts are also included from historical works and personal narratives. The book is arranged thematically, making it especially helpful for a teacher looking for material to support specific aspects of a curriculum.
Glatstein, Jacob. Anthology of Holocaust Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1973. (high school +)
Chapters in this collection cover life in the ghettos, children, the camps, resistance, and non-Jewish victims. Excerpts are included from both works of fiction and primary source materials such as diaries, memoirs, and ghetto documents. Many of these pieces can be especially useful if teachers provide additional background information on the authors and context of the writings.
Hegi, Ursula. Stones from the River. 1994. New York: Scribner Paperback, 1994. (high school +)
Trudi Montag is a zwerg, a dwarf, short, undesirable, different, and living in Germany during the Holocaust. She watches and is observant of the lives of her fellow villagers - their response to the Holocaust and the terror of the time.
Kerr, Judith. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. New York: Dell Yearling, 1987. (middle school+)
Nine-year old Anna and her family are forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. Anna's father is a prominent German journalist who does not agree with the Nazi party or Hitler. For the next four years, Anna and her family move from Switzerland to France and finally to England, experiencing life as Jewish refugees, while her father tries to find work.
Kertesz, Imre. Fateless. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992. (high school +)
Upon his return to his native Budapest, still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen-year old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind. George's response to his experience is ambivalent. Lacking emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he comes to the conclusion that neither his Jewishness nor his Hungarianness was really at the heart of his fate.
Laird, Christa. Shadow of the Wall. New York: Greenwillow, 1990. (middle school +)
Set in the Warsaw ghetto, this novel features a boy living with his two younger sisters in an orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, a distinguished physician, writer, and educator.
Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. (middle school +)
Annemarie Johansen is ten years old in 1943 when the Nazis plan to round up all the Jews in Denmark. This is the story of the Danish resistance as seen through her eyes an of the Danish people who helped to rescue almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark.
Orgel, Doris. The Devil in Vienna. New York: Puffin, 1988. (middle school +)
Based partly on the author's own experiences, this story is set in Vienna in the months leading up to the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938. Through her diary entries, a 13-year old Jewish girl recounts the difficulties of maintaining her close friendship with the daughter of a Nazi.
Orlev, Uri. The Island on Bird Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. (middle school +)
After his mother disappears and the German army takes his father, a young Jewish boy is forced to make his own way in the Warsaw ghetto. Alex takes refuge in an abandoned building to wait out the winter and hopes for his father's return.
Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. New York: Random House, 1990. (high school +)
Originally published as two separate stories in The New Yorker, the title story tells of a mother witnessing her baby's death at the hands of camp guards. Another story, "Rose," describes that same mother thirty years later, still haunted by the event.
Richter, Hans P. Friedrich. New York: Puffin Books, 1987. (middle school +)
Told in the first person, this autobiographical novel describes the friendship between two German boys, one Jewish and one not, and what happens to that relationship after the Nazis come to power and the non-Jewish boy's father joins the Nazi party.
Spinelli, Jerry. Milkweed: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. (middle school +)
A young, orphan boy survives on the streets of the Warsaw, a witness to the Nazi occupation and terror.
Uhlman, Fred. Reunion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. (high school +)
More a novella than a novel, this brief story told in retrospect by a Jewish German youth describes his friendship with a non-Jewish German youth during the 1930s. Its brevity and readability make it especially suitable for reluctant readers.
Yolen, Jane. Briar Rose. New York: Tom Doherty Associates Book, 1992. (high school +)
A story of the Holocaust intertwined with the German story of Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty. The setting is the time in which forests are patrolled by the German army during World War II.