Posted Wednesday January 27th 2010
by Rebecca Wilkie

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is marked throughout the world every year on 27 January - the date in 1945 that the notorious Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Russian troops; this year’s theme is the legacy of hope.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is marked throughout the world every year on 27 January - the date in 1945 that the notorious Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Russian troops; this year’s theme is the legacy of hope.

The day is held to honour and remember those who died during the holocaust and also to ensure that future generations are educated about what happened and reflect upon its consequences and those of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Literature is a powerful way of communicating the horrors of the holocaust to young people – reading about the experiences of individuals can be a more accessible way of understanding the atrocities of the Nazi regime and turns the mind -shattering statistics into a human reality.

The first introduction to holocaust literature for many young people of ten years and older is Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.  I can vividly recall reading it aged 11 and felt  as if Anne was speaking directly to me –  it took me a while to finish it and process the tragic ending but I was glad I had read it and it has stayed with me to this day.

A natural progression from reading Anne Frank’s diary was to Judith Kerr’s autobiographical trilogy of books, that begin with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit; they tell the story of a Jewish (though not religious) family fleeing Nazi Germany and starting a new life, first in Switzerland, then in England, still in print they have more than stood the test of time

There are many other notable books in the genre: I am David, is Anne Holm's 1963, now classic, account of David, a boy who is searching for his family having escaped from a concentration camp in an unnamed Eastern bloc country.  Another lone child is depicted in Jerry Spinelli’s Milkweed, which tells the tale of Misha, a young boy surviving in the Warsaw ghetto.

Morris Gleitzman’s outstanding Once and its sequel Then are humane, moving and at times gently humorous accounts of Felix, a ten year old Just William fan and his friend Zelda who escape the death camps and work together to survive in Nazi occupied Poland. Felix and Zelda are courageous and hopeful characters  - amongst my favourite in children’s literature, and excitingly, Gleitzman is working on the final instalment of the trilogy, Now, to be published in 2011.

John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas received much acclaim (and some controversy) when it was published in 2006 and has since been made into a film. It’s the tale of the naive Bruno, whose father runs Auschwitz, and the friendship he forms with a boy on the other side of the camp fence, it’s suitable for readers a few years older than the book's nine year old protagonist

Maus by Art Spieglman is a graphic novel account of the author’s parents, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe, again suitable for teenagers and adults, you don’t have to be a graphic novel aficionado to read and be moved by this poignant book.

Life in Britain during World War II is depicted in Leslie Wilson’s Saving Rafael , which sees  an English family hiding a Jewish friend, whose parents have been sent off to the camps;  for a different perspective again, Paul Dowswell’s Ausländer (shortlisted for the 2009 Booktrust Teenage Prize) portrays life in 1940s Berlin for Peter  an Aryan Polish boy who is adopted by a Nazi family and soon begins to question their values.

All of these books are thought-provoking and bring a human-face to the suffering of those persecuted by the Nazis but there are many more titles I’ve not mentioned. Let us know which books for young people you would recommend for Holocaust Memorial Day 2010.