Books on the Shoah to read on Remembrance Day

Essays, memoirs, novels. Here are the new editorial releases on the topic of Shoahwhich arrive in bookstores on the day of remembrance of January 27. They explore the lesser-known aspects of the most tragic page in the history of the 20th century and reconstruct its links with the present.

Lola Lafon, When will you listen to this song, Einaudi (17.50 euros)
An entire night in Anne Frank’s secret annex (today inside the Anne Frank House of Amsterdam). Lola Lafon’s book was born from this experience: a nocturnal exploration that becomes an interior journey, to rediscover a figure who has become an icon, to try to restore the brilliant, thoughtful teenager that she wrote in Diary and he died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, his truth as a victim and witness of Nazi persecution.

Carlotta Morgana, From Corso Vercelli to Treblinka. Story by Susanna Pardo, Giuntina, (16 euros)
Carlotta Morgana reconstructs the story of an Italian victim of extermination. Born in Thessaloniki into a Jewish family, who moved with her family to Milan as a child, Susanna Pardo married her cousin Davide and followed him to the Balkans. But here she was captured and deported to Treblinka. All traces of Susanna, Davide and little Esperance, her daughter born in 1941, had been lost. Until three years ago when, thanks to the work of historians Sara Berger and Marcello Pezzetti, documents from the Italian Interior and Foreign Ministries were found that demonstrate what happened. Thanks to their studies, interviews and research, Carlotta Morgana has reconstructed Susanna’s story. The text is enriched by the letters that Pardo wrote to her family of origin.

Edith Bruck, The fruits of memory. My testimony in schools, The ship of Theseus (15 euros)
Hungarian naturalized Italian, Edith Bruck, poet and writer, told her story as a survivor in highly successful books. This volume collects the letters and texts of students of all ages that Edith Bruck has met in recent years, bringing her testimony of the Holocaust to schools and everywhere. “Dear students” writes Bruck “after many years of sending me letters, verses, drawings, I feel the need to answer you, to tell not about my experience, which you know, and I hope you will never forget, like me, but about your promise to bring forward the testimony.”

Gaëlle Nohant, The archive of destinies, Neri Pozza (20 euros)
The novel by the French Gaëlle Nohant unfolds starting from the story of the Arolsen Archives, established to reconstruct the events of those who were persecuted and deported by the Nazi regime. The protagonist, Irène, a French woman transplanted to German soil, finds work at the large documentation and research center on Nazi persecution. And that job pushes her to do research, almost to investigate, to reconstruct a past that she will discover affects her very closely.

Élise Karlin, Reemerged from the night. The office of lost and found destinies, Lindau (19 euros)
Also Elise Karlin, French essayist and journalist, in I emerged from the night deals with the archives of Arolsen, the organization that researches deportees and victims of the Nazi regime and tracks down the heirs. An opportunity for Karlin to reconstruct the history of his family among the events of strangers who disappeared in concentration camps.

Simone Veil, Only hope soothes pain, Corbaccio (18 euros)
Simone Veil, who died in 2017 and was buried with full honors in the Pantheon in Paris, was a minister and fundamental figure in post-war France on several occasions. In this book, born from the video story she made about herself in 2006 for the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Veil retraces her youth in Nice, in a family of Jewish, republican and secular origins; a peaceful life, followed by the darkness of deportation and the difficulty of reintegrating into civil society upon her return and telling what had happened. The book is accompanied by a writing by Liliana Segre.

Christian Jennings, The Italians and the final solution, Longanesi (euro 22)
Who were the Italians who, in German-occupied Italy, decided to help their fellow Jewish citizens escape persecution? Historian Christian Jennings reconstructs their names and their stories. From the best known ones, such as that of the head doctor of the Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, Giovanni Borromeo, who invented a non-existent highly contagious infectious disease, the K syndrome, to save the Jews who had taken refuge in the hospital, to that of the cyclist Gino Bartali, proclaimed Righteous Among the Nations. From Don Francesco Repetto, who opened churches and convents in Liguria to fugitives, to the teenager Ernestina Madonini, who saved her peer Eugenia Cohen by hiding her in the attic of her house in the Cremona area.

Frediano Sessi, Beyond Auschwitz. Eastern Europe, the Holocaust removed (30 euros)
Be??ec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Che?mno sul Ner. Frediano Sassi’s research focuses on the places where one and a half million Eastern European Jews died, reconstructing the dynamics of a systematic annihilation operation which, compared to other aspects of the history of the European Shoah, has so far been less studied and remembered.