Source: The Jewish Daily Forward
With the help of readers' suggestions, Lawrence L. Langer, Michael Berenbaum, Joanne Weiner Rudof and Paula Hyman have compiled this all too brief list of writers, scholars and works. The list includes paintings, novels, memoirs, films, poems and graphic works, as well as historical studies. It provides a possible first step for those who would consider themselves Holocaust literate. The curators' intention was not to be populist, exclusive or exhaustive but to map a way into the subject.
Reading literature without knowing history is impossible. One cannot appreciate the literature of the Holocaust without a grounding in its history. But conversely, one cannot understand the Holocaust without the insight of witnesses and great artistic or literary figures. This list, with a number of readers' comments included, is a distillation of a body of work that the readers' have told about and which is expanding every year. The curators have organized the titles not as a definitive list, but rather, on Yom HaShoah of 5771, as a way to begin.