The survivors who wrote are the reason we know what we know about the inside of the camps and the ghettos. Their books are not the only evidence, but they are the evidence that put the catastrophe into the heads of the rest of us. Without Primo Levi, there is no English-speaking reader who knows what it was like to walk into Monowitz in October 1944. Without Elie Wiesel there is no public memory of the Hungarian deportations of summer 1944 in the form a reader can carry. Without Anne Frank there is no popular understanding of what hiding meant. These books are the public’s library on the Holocaust.
The list here is not exhaustive. It includes the writers most read in English, with attention to the range of their experiences. Primo Levi was a chemist from Turin who survived Auschwitz III Monowitz and wrote with a chemist’s eye. Elie Wiesel was a religious Jew from Sighet whose Night strips Buchenwald and Auschwitz to the bone. Viktor Frankl was a Vienna psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and Dachau and used the experience to develop logotherapy. Anne Frank was a child in hiding in Amsterdam whose diary was published by her father after the war. Hannah Arendt was a philosopher who escaped Germany before the war and reported the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker. Ruth Klüger was a child survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz whose memoir weiter leben is the sharpest written by anyone of her generation. Gerda Weissmann Klein survived a death march from a textile camp in Silesia and wrote about it for an American audience. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch played in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau and is still alive.
The section also includes survivors whose witness was political and legal, not literary. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust and spent the rest of his life pushing the United Nations to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which it did in December 1948. Szmul Zygielbojm, a Bundist member of the Polish government in exile, killed himself in London in May 1943 in protest at Allied inaction. Simon Wiesenthal survived Mauthausen and dedicated the rest of his life to tracking Nazi war criminals. Raul Hilberg was a refugee who became, with The Destruction of the European Jews, the first historian to document the Holocaust comprehensively from the perpetrators’ own records.
Several of these writers have been the subject of revisionist attacks, in particular Anne Frank, whose diary has been falsely claimed to be a fabrication, and Wiesel, whose Night has been picked at for minor details. The pages here address those attacks directly where relevant. The diaries are real. The memoirs are real. The witnesses are real. The attempt to discredit them is part of the larger project of denial covered elsewhere on this site.
What is here
- Primo Levi
- Elie Wiesel
- Viktor Frankl
- Anne Frank
- Hannah Arendt
- Marcel Marceau
- Raphael Lemkin
- Szmul Zygielbojm
- Simon Wiesenthal Survivor
- Raul Hilberg
- Gerda Weissmann Klein
- Ruth Kluger
- Jorge Semprun
- Imre Kertesz
- Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
- Kitty Hart-Moxon
- Georges Perec
- Leon Greenman
- Renee Firestone
- Thomas Buergenthal
- Zigi Shipper
- The Four Auschwitz Women
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards