Recommendations

Books Like The Diary of a Young Girl

Best books to read after The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Anne Frank's Diary is the most widely read Holocaust document — the voice of a teenager in hiding until her arrest and death in Bergen-Belsen. These recommendations explore the Holocaust memoir tradition or offer companion reading in the tradition of first-hand testimony that insists on the individuality of the millions who died.

  1. 1

    Night

    by Elie Wiesel

    The essential companion Holocaust memoir — Wiesel's account of what happened to a Jewish teenager who was deported, as Anne Frank was deported; the voice of someone who survived to witness what Anne Frank did not.

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  2. 2

    Anne Frank Remembered

    by Miep Gies

    The companion memoir by one of the helpers — Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank and her family and who found and preserved the diary after the Gestapo raid; the essential companion that tells the story of the Annex from the outside.

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  3. 3

    Man's Search for Meaning

    by Viktor E. Frankl

    The psychiatrist's Holocaust testimony — Frankl's account of surviving Auschwitz and Dachau and the logotherapy philosophy he developed; the nonfiction companion that, like the Diary, uses a personal voice to make the Holocaust specific and individual rather than statistical.

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  4. 4

    Maus

    by Art Spiegelman

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir — Spiegelman's father's story of surviving Auschwitz, the complement to the Diary in reaching readers across age groups and through a completely different artistic form.

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  5. 5

    The Diary of a Young Girl (Etty Hillesum)

    by Etty Hillesum

    The closest companion diary — Etty Hillesum's diary written in Amsterdam between 1941 and 1943, also by a young Jewish Dutch woman, also ending in Auschwitz; published as An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, Hillesum's diary is less widely known than Frank's but equally extraordinary.

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  6. 6

    The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

    by John Boyne

    The fictional companion for younger readers — Bruno, the nine-year-old son of an Auschwitz commandant, and his friendship with Shmuel on the other side of the fence; the novel most frequently paired with Anne Frank's Diary in classroom contexts.

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  7. 7

    The Hiding Place

    by Corrie ten Boom

    The Dutch Christian helper's testimony — Corrie ten Boom and her family hiding Jews in their Haarlem home and eventually being arrested and sent to Ravensbrück; the companion story of the Dutch helpers who made the Annex possible, told from a different perspective.

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  8. 8

    Sarah's Key

    by Tatiana de Rosnay

    The French Holocaust companion novel — a journalist in contemporary Paris discovering the story of a ten-year-old Jewish girl arrested in the Vel d'Hiv Roundup of 1942; the fiction companion that most directly inhabits the perspective of a Jewish child in hiding during the same period as the Diary.

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