The Camps

China Byers Abells Children We Remember

Key Stage 2 (with care), 3   
 

Through moving photographs from the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, Israel, archivist Chana Byers Abells has created an unforgettable essay about the children who lived and died during the Holocaust. And while it is a story of death and loss, it is also a story of courage and endurance. It is a story that must be told to all of today's children.
It looks like a normal picture book but contains real photos.  

 

John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas 

Key Stages 2 (with care), 3 


Arguably the story is that of Bruno's father. It is his tragedy and his fatal flaw is his enthusiasm for the Final Solution. Bruno, aged 9-10 gets into Auschwitz to join his friend Bruno who finds him some striped pyjamas. The two little boys are gassed. Only those who know about the Holocaust will know what is coming. The film made form the book seems to em to be really aimed at adults. Boyne finishes the book: "Of course this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again.
Not in this day and age."                    

 

Charlotte Delbo's Ausschwitz and After 

Adult / scholar
  


This is a memoir of life in the concentrations camps. Charlotte Delbo was a French resistance leader. After the war she became a literary figure. This book contains vignettes, poems and pros poems about horror, heroism and conscience.    

 

Roberto Innocenti / Christophe Gallaz 

Key Stages 2, 3  


 This is actually written in French but the pictures tell the story anyway, without the words. Indeed there is an "English" version of the book that has no words in it at all. It is a truly international book. I0t is published in Canada, written in French, set in Germany and has lots of German sign language. Rose is fascinated by the inmates of one of the concentration camps. One day they all disappear, Rose with them. We may assume they are involved with one of the death marches. This is not stated specifically. It would provoke a good discussion at key Stage 3 and might be used alongside a French lesson.        

 

Antonio Iturbe's The Librarian of Auschwitz

 Adult


  It wasn’t an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less sombre times, when words rang out more loudly than machine guns…’

David Karmi Survivor's Game 

Adult / young adult 
 


Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams. Twelve-year-old David Karmi, a master of the art, is about to be put to the ultimate test.
War has consumed the world and David finds himself in the middle of a human slaughter on a planetary scale. Whole towns are vaporized. Cities obliterated in firestorms. More than fifty million people will die—twelve million either gassed, shot, hanged, worked to death or subjected to biological experiments.

Primo Levi If this is a man / the Truce

Adult / young adult

 

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH
This is classic and as honest as it can get about what the camps were like.

 Giuliana Tedeschi There is a Place on Earth 

 

An autobiographical account of a young woman from Turin's Jewish intellectual community who was deported to Birkenau concentration camp in April 1944. This book is a description of the nightmare she experienced there.

Margaret Wild and Julie Vivas 

Key Stage 1,2,3 

  

"My name is Miriam, and this is where I live. Hut 18, bed 22. The younger children think they have always lived in the hut, but Miriam knows better. She remembers her parents and her home, with her very own toys. In this place there are no toys. So Miriam and the women come up with a special plan, to celebrate the day when the soldiers open the gates to freedom." So runs the blurb.
Mainly 5* reviews on Amazon though there is one 1*.  It is perhaps a little wordy for key Stage 1 but if one wanted to teach the Holocaust that early the pictures and the stories work well. It does anyway follow the normal picture book conventions.
It has an upbeat ending and is upbeat throughout though tells not lies.       

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