Writing the Holocaust

Schindler's List

By Thomas Keneally

Predating Steven Spielberg’s famous movie (and originally published as Schindler’s Ark), here is the origin of the famous savior of hundreds of Jewish workers in Krakow—a flawed, dissolute, philandering “businessman” who engages in a battle of conscience against his self-destructive instincts and the lure of money and esteem. Fortunately conscience wins out.

The Odessa File

By Frederick Forsythe

Both a gripping thriller of a reporter’s undercover efforts to penetrate and expose the secret Nazi organization ODESSA that hid those who perpetrated the Final Solution, and a son’s search for his father. The moment when Miller confronts ex-commandant Roschmann with a picture of his father is, for me, one of those reasons I wanted to become a writer. I always thought it was the stronger book than Day of the Jackal.

Sophie's Choice

By William Styron

Styron’s canvas is a writer’s life in Brooklyn during the 1950’s, but the real moral tableau is the conflicted, turbulent world of Sophie Zawistowska’s hidden past. Her confession to Stingo of what she had to do in Auschwitz to survive is some of the saddest, most compelling reading ever. To me this is ultimately a book about judgment and shame, and how you can never know someone enough to judge them for what they do.

Marathon Man

By William Goldman

A second book about a son’s search for his father. Peeling back the onion of his family’s past which leads to a secret organization to repatriate Nazi war criminals, this set back the profession of dentistry for 20 years!

The Wind Chill Factor

By Thomas Gifford

Another reporter’s effort to confront his concealed past, but even more harrowing. Paranoia and conspiracy meet head-on as everything John Cooper knew and counted on is found to be a lie. A venerable, aristocratic Minnesota family are the intellectual descendents of the Third Reich, set to build The Fourth one in the U.S. Like all good conspiracy novels, the stakes just keep getting wider and wider in this one….

Mila 18

By Leon Uris

The stirring story of resistance and passion amid the Warsaw ghetto, which is reduced to rubble as a brave squad of young resistance fighters stay and battle the Nazis to their end…. Everyone should read it.

City of Thieves

By David Benioff

Okay, not directly tied to the Holocaust in any way, but I can’t leave off David Benioff’s funny, tragic, compelling novel. It features two likeable young thieves who are about to be executed in war-ravaged Leningrad, searching for two eggs for the Commandant’s daughter’s wedding. One of my favorite novels ever.