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What to Read on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

A look through Tablet’s archives

by
Hannah Dreyfus
January 27, 2014
A survivor puts down a candle during a ceremony in the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2014.(JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
A survivor puts down a candle during a ceremony in the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2014.(JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time to look back and remember the atrocities, losses, and personal triumphs that paint our most vivid communal memories. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of recommended reading from our archives.

Nearly 70 years later, Marsha Kreuzman, 90, met Joe Barbella, 93, the man who liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp where she was held prisoner.

Through a series of arresting illustrations, Lella Corman shares her own personal story of loss and how she turned to the tale of her grandfather, whose entire family was killed in the Holocaust, in order to gain strength.

At age 95, a Holocaust survivor reconnects with some of the family she thought she’d lost forever. A story of renewal and revival against all odds.

An heirloom watch and a yellowing photograph teach the grandson of a Holocaust survivor the prewar story of his grandfather that he never knew.

A father struggles with how to teach his son about the Holocaust, and arrives at Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel, Maus, as the answer.

Aaron Wolfe reflects on his grandfather’s silence about his experience during the Holocaust. It wasn’t until after he passed away that Wolfe was able to uncover the full-story of his grandfather’s painful past.

A quiet, nondescript farming town tucked in the heart of Poland conceals a story of a true heroism. In this small town, a Jewish-born teacher was hid and protected as the war raged on all sides.

In this moving essay, a granddaughter finds the recipe her grandmother used to use to make challah before she was killed in the Holocaust.

Hannah Dreyfus is an editorial intern at Tablet.