Night (1960) is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship, as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."
Rudolf Höss was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. He tested and implemented various methods to accelerate Hitler's plan to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the "Final Solution". On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced pesticide Zyklon B containing hydrogen cyanide into the killing process.
House of Dolls is a 1955 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers.
Maria Mandl was an Austrian SS-Helferin infamous for her key role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp where she is believed to have been directly complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 female prisoners. She was executed for war crimes.
Charlotte Delbo,, was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.
There is a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Holocaust in popular culture.
Hana "Hanička" Brady was a Czech Jewish girl murdered in the gas chambers at German concentration camp of Auschwitz, located in the occupied territory of Poland, during the Holocaust. She is the subject of the 2002 non-fiction children's book Hana's Suitcase, written by Karen Levine.
Czesława Kwoka was a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered at the age of 14 in Auschwitz. One of thousands of child victims of German World War II crimes against Poles in German-occupied Poland, she is among those memorialized in an Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibit, "Block no. 6: Exhibition: The Life of the Prisoners".
Kitty Hart-Moxon, OBE is a Polish-English Holocaust survivor. She was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1943 at age 16, where she survived for two years, and was also imprisoned at other camps. Shortly after her liberation in April 1945 by American soldiers, she moved to England with her mother, where she married and dedicated her life to raising awareness of the Holocaust. She has written two autobiographies entitled I am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981).
Herzogenbusch concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp located in Vught near the city of 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Herzogenbusch was, with Natzweiler-Struthof in occupied France, the only concentration camp run directly by the SS in western Europe outside Germany. The camp was first used in 1943 and held 31,000 prisoners. 749 prisoners died in the camp, and the others were transferred to other camps shortly before the camp was liberated by the Allied Forces in 1944. After the war the camp was used as a prison for Germans and Dutch collaborators. Today there is a visitors' center with exhibitions and a national monument remembering the camp and its victims. The camp is now a museum.
The issue of why Auschwitz concentration camp was not bombed by the Allies during World War II continues to be explored by historians.
The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink. Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet star along with the young actor David Kross. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died prior to its release. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on December 10, 2008.
Olga Lengyel was a Hungarian Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who later wrote about her experiences in her book Five Chimneys. She was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust.
Denis Avey was a British veteran of the Second World War who was held as a prisoner of war at Auschwitz. Whilst there, he saved the life of Jewish prisoner Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling cigarettes to him. For that he was made a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010.
David Dario Gabbai is a Greek Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in the burning of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that were deported to the camp during the spring and summer of that year.
Eva Geiringer Schloss, MBE is a Holocaust survivor memoirist and stepdaughter of Otto Frank, the father of Margot and diarist Anne Frank.
Dr. Jadwiga Lenartowicz-Rylko was a Polish Catholic physician imprisoned in the Ravensbruck, Gross-Rosen, Neusalz, and Flossenbürg concentration camps operated by the German Third Reich during World War II. While Lenartowicz was incarcerated as a political prisoner, she was assigned to medically treat the prisoners held captive in Adolf Hitler's multiple Nazi concentration camps by working as a camp doctor. Lenartowicz was the daughter of a feldsher. As Lenartowicz grew up, she watched her father take care of his patients in the city of Łódź. She went on to follow in his footsteps going into the medicine. Once completed with medical school, she would go on to her residency at the Anna Maria Hospital. World War II would affect her life the most when she would be arrested by the Gestapo.
Still Alive (2001) written by Ruth Klüger, is a memoir of her experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna and later in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt. However, as it's written by Klüger as a 70-year-old woman, the memoir goes beyond her experience as an inmate, chronicling her escape from Christianstadt's death march with her mother and adopted sister, Susi. The narrative ends not only with their self-liberation, or even with the general liberation by Allied forces, but goes beyond to her life as a post-war refugee. She outlines for the reader the difficulties she experienced in migrating to America, as well as the challenges and culture shock she faced as a foreigner trying to obtain an education and a place in society.
Bat-Sheva Dagan is a Polish-Israeli Holocaust survivor, educator, author, and speaker. Born in Łódź, Poland, she was incarcerated in a ghetto in Radom with her parents and two sisters in 1940. After her parents and a sister were deported and murdered in Treblinka in August 1942, she escaped to Germany, but was discovered, imprisoned, and deported to Auschwitz in May 1943. After spending 20 months in Auschwitz, she survived two death marches and was liberated by British troops in May 1945. She was the only survivor of her family. She and her husband settled in Israel, where she taught kindergarten and later obtained degrees in educational counseling and psychology. She went on to author books, poems, and songs for children and young adults on Holocaust themes, and developed psychological and pedagogical methods for teaching the Holocaust to children. She is considered a pioneer in children's Holocaust education.
