January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

On this annual day of commemoration here are a few associated books:

These are two wonderful gifts I received last Christmas.

“The Holocaust Museum In Washington” This book was written by Jeshajahu Weinberg, the founding director of the museum. There are hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs throughout the book–photos of kitchen utensils, hair, shoes, forged documents, artificial limbs, and luggage and prayer shawls confiscated from the victims. Haunting and terrifying are photos showing charred corpses of concentration camp inmates, a starved prisoner in Buchenwald, a young Jewish partisan woman being hanged in Minsk in 1941, Danish Jews escaping to Sweden on a small boat, and Hungarian Jews arriving in Auschwitz in 1944. The book provides a well-rounded history of  the Holocaust, but I would still really love to visit this museum in person!

“Once We Were Brothers” a fictional novel by Ronald…