Books by Holocaust Survivors

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl · 1946

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived four camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. His wife, his parents, and his brother did not. Man’s Search for Meaning is the book he wrote from his experience: the first half a memoir of what he witnessed in the camps, the second half the foundation of logotherapy — his theory that the will to meaning is the primary human drive, and that what keeps a person alive is a reason to live. It has sold over 16 million copies and has never been out of print.

This book is on my shelf and I return to it regularly. Frankl does not offer comfort in the obvious sense — he offers something harder and more useful: the argument that between stimulus and response, there is always a space, and that space is where human freedom lives. That idea, extracted from the worst conditions imaginable, is one of the most durable things I have read.

→ Read my full thoughts on Man’s Search for Meaning

Night

Elie Wiesel · 1960

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he and his family were deported from the Transylvanian town of Sighet to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Night is the account of what followed: the separation from his mother and sisters, the death marches, and above all the relationship with his father, which became the axis around which his survival turned. It is one of the shortest and most devastating books ever written — fewer than 130 pages that have never been out of print since their first publication in French in 1958. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Night does not try to explain or contextualise. It witnesses. The book’s power comes from what it refuses to do: it does not offer meaning, redemption, or a lesson. It simply tells you what happened to a boy and what it cost him. That refusal is itself a kind of moral statement, and it is what makes the book impossible to forget.

The Choice

Edith Eger · 2017

Edith Eger was sixteen and a promising ballet dancer in Hungary when she was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. She survived — partly, she believes, because Dr. Mengele asked her to dance for him, and she danced. She emigrated to the United States, trained as a clinical psychologist, and spent decades treating trauma survivors before she wrote this book at the age of ninety. The Choice is both her memoir and her argument: that we cannot choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we respond, and that the prison we most need to escape is the one we build inside ourselves.

The Choice is the most practically useful book on this list. Frankl gives you the philosophy; Eger gives you the application — she shows, through her own life and through her patients’, what it actually looks like to choose freedom after the worst has happened. I recommend it to anyone working through something they cannot change.

→ Books like The Choice — what to read next

Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi · 1947

Also published as If This Is a Man, this is Primo Levi’s account of the eleven months he spent as a prisoner in the chemical kommando at Auschwitz-Monowitz. Levi was an Italian Jew and a trained chemist, and he writes about the Lager with the precision of a scientist and the moral seriousness of a philosopher — observing, categorising, and refusing easy conclusions. The book was rejected by several Italian publishers before finding a small press in 1947; it was reissued by Einaudi in 1958 and has never been out of print since. Levi is widely considered the greatest prose writer to emerge from the Holocaust.

What makes Levi different from every other writer on this list is his refusal of sentiment. He does not ask for your pity or your outrage. He asks for your attention. The result is a book that does more damage than any number of more explicitly harrowing accounts, because it trusts you to draw the conclusions yourself.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · 1947

Anne Frank was thirteen when she went into hiding with her family in a concealed apartment in Amsterdam in 1942. She kept a diary for two years and three months, until the morning in August 1944 when the hiding place was discovered and the family was arrested. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before liberation. Her father Otto, the only member of the family to survive, retrieved the diary and arranged for its publication in 1947. It has since been translated into more than 70 languages and is one of the most-read books in the world.

The Diary is on this list because it is not primarily a Holocaust document — it is the diary of a teenager who happened to be in hiding during the Holocaust. Anne writes about friendship, ambition, her complicated relationship with her mother, her love for Peter, her desire to become a writer. That ordinariness is what makes the ending unbearable. You know what is coming. She does not.

The Gift

Edith Eger · 2020

Edith Eger’s second book, written three years after The Choice, is her most direct guide to the twelve prisons of the mind — the thought patterns and emotional traps that keep people from living freely, regardless of their circumstances. Where The Choice is a memoir threaded with psychological insight, The Gift is the other way around: a psychological framework illustrated with case studies from Eger’s decades of clinical practice, and anchored at every point by her own experience. It is the book to read if The Choice changed how you think and you want to go further.

The Gift is more practical than The Choice and in some ways more demanding. It asks you to look at your own patterns with the same honesty Eger brought to hers. The chapter on victimhood is the most uncomfortable and the most necessary.

Maus

Art Spiegelman · 1986–1991

Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, survived Auschwitz. Maus is the story of Vladek’s survival, told in the form of a graphic novel in which Jews are depicted as mice and Nazis as cats. It is also the story of Art interviewing his father decades later, and of the complicated, painful relationship between a survivor and his American son. Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 — the first graphic novel to do so — and is now one of the canonical texts of Holocaust literature. It remains among the most frequently challenged books in American schools.

Maus does something no prose memoir can do: it puts the act of transmission on the page. You are reading Vladek’s story, but you are also watching Art struggle to record it, struggle with his father, struggle with the weight of a history that is not quite his. That double frame — survivor and inheritor — is the argument of the book, and it is one that grows more relevant with each passing generation.

The Periodic Table

Primo Levi · 1975

Primo Levi’s most celebrated book organises the chapters of his life around the elements of the periodic table — each chapter named for a chemical element that corresponds to a period in his autobiography. Carbon, Iron, Zinc, Gold: the elements become lenses through which he examines his Jewish family, his education, his work as a chemist, his internment in Auschwitz, and his postwar life. The American Chemical Society named it the best science book ever written. Saul Bellow called it “a necessary book” and “among the few books written after the Holocaust that seem absolutely essential.”

The Periodic Table is the better Primo Levi to start with if you have already read Survival in Auschwitz. It is more playful, more various, more confident — the work of a writer who has fully found his form. The final chapter, Carbon, is one of the finest pieces of prose written in the twentieth century.