Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom Ha-Shoah, is observed on May 5, 2016. This day commemorates the destruction of millions of lives in the German death camps in Europe during World War II. Vocabulary.com has produced lists inspired by both fictional and non-fictional accounts of these events by people who perished and those who survived.
Perhaps the most famous piece of literature to come out of the Holocaust is The Diary of Anne Frank, the true story of a little girl whose family is forced to hide from the Nazis in an attic. Anne's diary and the events surrounding it were dramatized into a play, and it is this adaptation that the Vocabulary.com list is drawn from.
The Book Thief is a work of fiction with some themes in common with The Diary of Anne Frank, as Markus Zuzak's novel involves a foster child in Nazi Germany who hides a Jewish boy. As is fitting for a time of such destruction, the book is narrated by Death.
Night, by Elie Wiesel, is the factual account of Wiesel's own experiences in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. Wiesel's story is one of trying to keep your humanity while being faced with some of the harshest inhumanity the world has ever known. It is a harrowing account of survival while also making note of those things that even the survivors have lost forever. Wiesel became an advocate for Holocaust remembrance and other Jewish causes, and Vocabulary.com has also produced lists from two of his speeches: "Hope, Despair and Memory" was delivered when Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and "The Perils of Indifference" was delivered at The White House.
Number the Stars is a book by master young adult novelist Lois Lowry which involves the rescue of Danish Jews from the holocaust. For a factual account of a similar rescue operation, Vocabulary.com presents a list from the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the safe passage of 669 children from Czechoslovakia into Britain as the Nazis were closing in.
Maus is a very different kind of Holocaust survival story. It is told from the perspective of the son of Holocaust survivors and deals with the slow revelation of the narrator's father's story of hiding from the Nazis and his eventual capture. The story, which is a graphic novel, goes back and forth between the modern day frustrations the narrator experiences with his father and the life-and-death decisions his father had to make on a minute-by-minute basis to avoid capture. Like The Diary of Anne Frank and The Book Thief, you can sense in Maus the tension of being discovered that will most likely lead to death. As in Wiesel's work, Maus deals with how survivors are altered forever by their experiences. Like all the works represented by lists here, Maus stands as a monument to memory, to events in history that may seem inconceivable to us now but which we can never afford to forget.