Five great Holocaust books

How do you define 'Holocaust literature'? The idea itself seems absurd, if not obscene; but the efforts of writers and philosophers to understand one of the most incomprehensible events in human history have produced mountains of books, some of them truly great, and it's an understandable instinct to lump them all together under a definable category. But categories are dangerous: some books are really about things they never explicitly mention, and some pretend to be about things that they're not; sometimes subsequent events give a book meanings it was never intended to have when it was written.

With that in mind, here are five books, some well-known and some less so (and not all of them obvious choices), that concern or reflect upon or bear some meaningful relation to the Holocaust. Not all of them would sit comfortably on a shelf marked 'Holocaust Literature', and this is by no means a 'best-of' list; instead, we hope these books might open up new perspectives or introduce you to writers you hadn't yet encountered.

> Elie Wiesel - Night (Penguin)

One of the greatest Holocaust memoirs, Night records Elie Wiesel's childhood in Transylvania, his deportation, his separation from his family and his journey with his dying father through the inferno of the concentration camps. There's little to say about this book that hasn't already been said: stark, tender, raging and bereft, it established Wiesel as a kind of unofficial spokesman for the survivors, and forced the world to pay attention.

> Anatoly Kuznetsov - Babi Yar (Pocket)

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where between 1941 and 1943 the Nazis murdered untold numbers of Jews, Roma, the disabled, Ukrainian resisters and hostages. Anatoly Kuznetsov was a boy at the time, and lived with his grandparents in a house nearby: the ravine would give him the title, and the central focus, of the book in which he attempted to make sense of the experiences of occupation, genocide and survival. Vivid reminiscences of a childhood spent under brutal occupation are interspersed with others' experiences of Babi Yar and the mechanism of slaughter of which it was a part. Kuznetsov flits between these two strands, digressing, speculating, lamenting and admonishing in ways that are sometimes almost playful - such as a list entitled "Reasons why I should have been shot". Sprawling and painfully sincere, Babi Yar is a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with an atrocity that its author knows will never be quite comprehensible.

> Primo Levi - The Drowned and the Saved (Abacus)

The Drowned and the Saved was written towards the end of Primo Levi's life, and unlike his earlier memoirs If This is a Man and The Truce, it doesn't explicitly narrate his experiences in Auschwitz and after liberation. Instead, it's a collection of meditative essays, attempts to get to the bottom of the world of the concentration camps. Although, as Levi famously writes, the survivors can never know the whole truth (that is the preserve only of the lost, the drowned), the penetration of his insight is staggering: whether writing about the language of the camps or the complex moral grey area of collaboration with camp authorities, he approaches his subject with clarity, passion, and unstinting moral commitment.

> W G Sebald - Austerlitz (Penguin)

Austerlitz is about memory and forgetting, and the shadows of absence and guilt that the Holocaust cast forward into the future. Written in Sebald's trademark gorgeous and unhurried prose, the novel follows Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian whose investigations into his subject, and into the labyrinth of his own confused memory, lead him inexorably back into his past as a child of the Kindertransport - the few thousand lucky Jewish children evacuated from Europe before the start of war - and into the monstrous destruction at the heart of European history.

> Joseph Roth - The Wandering Jews (Granta)

Finally, a book about what was lost. Written before the War - so, in fact, not a book 'about' the Holocaust at all - this slim volume records the great novelist and journalist Joseph Roth's journeys and observations amongst the Jews of Eastern Europe. Affectionate, frustrated, angry, comic and tragic, Roth's sketches and mini-essays portray a society and a world that was already under threat, and soon to be extinguished altogether. The final pages note 'swastika'd schoolchildren' and the spectre of mechanised barbarism: that no-one, not even Roth, could have foreseen the scale of the cataclysm that would follow makes the experience of reading The Wandering Jews excruciatingly sad. Written as socially-concerned journalism, it became, post-facto, an unintentional elegy for a vanished world.