HaShoah
I've spent a good deal of my life studying the Holocaust. Perhaps an unhealthy amount, as I began my studies when I was nine years old and I haven't completed them yet. This page, however, does not hold all of my information. Maybe one day it will. At the moment, it hosts what I suppose you could call a taster.
I'm often asked for book and movie recommendations and so this is where I will give them. Every Month I will recommend a different movie, fiction book, non-fiction book, and children's book. This may later move up to every couple of weeks. We'll see as it goes.
At some undisclosed time in the future, I will be including links to more information. For the moment, if you want to know, email me here and I will get back to you as quickly as I can. Any derogatory remarks or Anti-Semitic notes will be dealt with harshly up to and including my notifying the Anti-Defamation League. I do not take such things lightly.
Not quite a Holocaust movie, but more of a lead up to it...Max is about a Jewish artist and art dealer who encourages Hitler to pursue his artistic talent rather than his propoganda/political talent. John Cusack is wonderful in it as Max Rothman, the Jewish art dealer, and Noah Taylor is eerie as the young-ish Adolf Hitler. Very good movie!
Bread for the Departed by Bogdan Wojdowski is fiction in name only. Wojdowski, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, paints an all too real picture of what life in the Ghetto was like. This is a hard hitting, painful to read account from the viewpoint of a child who, along with every other person in the Ghetto, will do anything for a piece of bread to stave off starvation a bit longer. Read in parts, it will help your stomach stay intact.
This is a unique look at the Holocaust. I'm not really sure how to categorize it, but as it is the true story of the author's father, Non-Fiction seemed to be the best fit. Maus A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel of Spiegelman's father's time in Auschwitz. It's incredible and difficult to explain. Although it is in comic strip form, this is not a book for children. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone younger than mature teenagers. But it is definitely a one of a kind look at the Holocaust.
Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli is an unusual look at the ghettoizing of Warsaw from the viewpoint of a boy who does not know his own background, is a street rat who survives by stealing, and who is not Jewish but adopts a Jewish identity. Very good book. Best line, (reworded a bit) "I was made to live in a crazy time and while the world was mad I lived well. But when sanity restored itself, the world had no place for me and I was the mad one." Not very graphic, but READ BEFORE GIVING TO A CHILD.