People of the book, by Geraldine Brooks

As meticulously researched as all of Brooks’s previous work, ‘People of the Book’ is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival. It takes place in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, as a young book conservator arrives in Sarajevo to restore a lost treasure.

 

The dressmaker of Dachau, by Mary Chamberlain

London, Spring 1939. 18-year-old Ada Vaughan, a beautiful and ambitious seamstress, has just started work for a modiste in Dover Street. A career in couture is hers for the taking -  if only she can break free from the dreariness of family life in Lambeth. A chance meeting with the enigmatic Stanislaus von Lieben catapults Ada into a world of glamour and romance. When he suggests a trip to Paris, Ada is blind to all the warnings of war on the continent: this is her chance for a new start. Anticipation turns to despair when war is declared and the two are trapped in France. When the Nazis invade, Stanislaus abandons her and she is taken prisoner, sent to Germany as slave labour and forced to survive on her wits alone. 

 

The most precious of cargoes, by Jean-Claude Grumberg

Once there lived a poor woodcutter and his wife, barely making ends meet as war rages around them. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child. A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps one in a shawl and throws her into the forest. While foraging for food, the woodcutter's wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harbouring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home. Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairy tale-like lyricism, 'The Most Precious of Cargoes' reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

 

The tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris

This novel is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews, who survived Auschwitz and eventually made their home in Australia. In that terrible place, Lale was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival - literally scratching numbers into his fellow victims' arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.

 

The yellow bird sings, by Jennifer Rosner

Poland, 1941. Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, are the only surviving Jews in their town. They spend day and night hidden in a neighbour's barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother's stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head. Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether the best thing she can do for her daughter is keep her close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go.

 

The tobacconist, by Robert Seethaler

When 17-year-old Franz exchanges his home in the idyllic beauty of the Austrian lake district for the bustle of Vienna, his homesickness quickly dissolves amidst the thrum of the city. In his role as apprentice to the elderly tobacconist Otto Trsnyek, he will soon be supplying the great and good of Vienna with their newspapers and cigarettes. Among the regulars is a Professor Freud, whose predilection for cigars and occasional willingness to dispense romantic advice will forge a bond between him and young Franz.

 

Non-fiction

The dressmakers of Auschwitz, by Lucy Adlington

At the height of the Holocaust, 25 young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were selected to design, cut and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop - called the Upper Tailoring Studio - was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant's wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz and for ladies from Nazi Berlin's upper crust. Drawing on diverse sources - including interviews with the last surviving seamstress - 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz' follows the fates of these brave women.

 

Escape from the ghetto, by John Carr

This extraordinary but true tale of a boy's escape from the ghetto and the prospect of extermination in the camps, and of his journey to adulthood as he made his way across Europe, is almost unbearably exciting while being at the same time, as all true stories are, complex and bitter-sweet.

 

Lily's promise, by Lily Ebert

When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he'd written 'Good luck and happiness'. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance. In 'Lily's Promise' she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe.

 

Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, by Daniel Finkelstein

From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father's devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.

 

The escape artist, by Jonathan Freedland

In April 1944 a teenager named Rudolf Vrba was planning a daring and unprecedented escape from Auschwitz. After hiding in a pile of timber planks for three days while 3000 SS men and their bloodhounds searched for him, Vrba and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler would eventually cross Nazi-occupied Poland on foot, as penniless fugitives. Their mission: to tell the world the truth of the Final Solution. A thrilling history with enormous historical implications, 'The Escape Artist' tells the extraordinary story of a complex man who would seek escape again and again: first from Auschwitz, then from his past, even from his own name.

 

The daughter of Auschwitz, by Tova Friedman

Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, while her father was transported to Dachau. During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities that she could never forget, and experienced numerous escapes from death. In 'The Daughter of Auschwitz', Tova immortalises what she saw, to keep the story of the Holocaust alive. Written with former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, their meticulous research has helped Tova recall her experiences in searing detail.

 

Mala's cat, by Mala Kacenberg

Growing up in the Polish village of Tamogrod on the fringes of a deep pine forest gives Mala the happiest childhood she could have hoped for. But, when the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto, and her family and friends are reduced to starvation. Taking matters into her own hands, she sneaks out to surrounding villages to barter for food. On her way back one day, she sees her loved ones rounded up for deportation and receives a smuggled letter from her sister warning her to stay away. With only her cat, Malach, and the strength of the stories taught by her family, she walks away from everything she holds dear.

 

A mother's courage, by Malka Levine

'A Mother's Courage' is Holocaust survivor Malka Levine's powerful and moving tribute to a determined and resourceful woman who refused to give up hope so long as her children needed her.

 

How to be a refugee, by Simon May

The most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler's Germany is either emigration or deportation to concentration camps. But there was another, much rarer, side to Jewish life at that time: denial of your origin to the point where you manage to erase almost all consciousness of it. You refuse to believe that you are Jewish. 'How to Be a Refugee' is Simon May's account of how three sisters - his mother and his two aunts - grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing 'Aryan' status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler's regime, and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.

 

The stable boy of Auschwitz, by Henry Oster

Henry Oster was just five years old when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. One of the 2,011 Jews who were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported from Cologne, he was one of only 23 to emerge alive from the concentration camps after the war. This book is an inspirational true account of a courageous little boy who, against all odds, after losing almost everything a human being can lose, survived to tell his story.

 

A gypsy in Auschwitz, by Otto Rosenberg

Otto Rosenberg is 9 and living in Berlin, poor but happy, when his family is detained. All around them, Sinti and Roma families are being torn from their homes by Nazis, forced to live in encampments outside the city. One by one, families are broken up, adults and children disappear or are 'sent East'. Otto arrives in Auschwitz aged 16; he is later transferred to Buechenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He works, scrounges food whenever he can, witnesses and suffers horrific violence and is driven close to death by illness more than once. Unbelievably, he also joins an armed revolt of prisoners who, facing the SS and certain death, refuse to back down. Somehow, through luck, sheer human will to live, or both, he survives. The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold.