The Holocaust in Popular Culture - Children's Literature

Children's Literature

In 1988, Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic was published; the book hurls its protagonist—an American teenage Jewish girl of the 1980s—back in time, back to the terrifying circumstances of being a young Jewish girl in a Polish shtetl in the 1940s.

In 2006, young adult author John Boyne created an innocent perspective of the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has been adapted into a 2009 movie of the same name.

Markus Zusak's The Book Thief was a Holocaust story narrated by Death himself. Fellow Australian Morris Gleitzman's novels for children Once and Now deal with Jewish children on the run from the Nazis during World War Two; while another Australian, Ursula Dubosarsky's prize-winning companion novels The First Book of Samuel (1995) and Theodora's Gift (2005) are about children living in contemporary Australia in a family of Holocaust survivors.

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