Yes! Damn, now I want to reread all of these books. Aimee, you want me to do your homework for you?

And Laga, Where the Redfern Grows was the title I was conflating with Lilies.

Yeah, me too. I'm mentally combing the bookshelf in my old bedroom. I know exactly where I put some of those books when I moved out.

About ten years ago, I designed the costumes for The Diary of Anne Frank. I read so many books about the Holacaust, and in particular young people, that I completely made myself sick with grief. To the point that I still have recurring Holocaust dreams. Then I realized that there was literally nothing I could do about history and I had learned enough that I hope I would be able to fight against something like that in the future. And so I am no longer able to read about the Holocaust, and I may be missing some good books, but I am OK with that to spare my mental health.

a YA about someone named Liese during WW2

Number the Stars, I think.

I'm the same way with movies. After Life is Beautiful I was done with holocaust tales. Likewise The Deer Hunter and POW films.

I think Roll of Thunder is a terrific book.

Out of all the Holocaust reading I've done, the best (in at least offering some hope) that I've read is Escape from Sobibor, about a (somewhat) successful camp breakout (50 out of 275,000 people sent to the camp survive to VE day). There was a good TV film made from the book starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer.

Saw that film in one of my hs history classes. Maybe 10th? 9th? Teenagers totally in tears heading off to the next class, not knowing what happened next. Oof.

I had classes in uni on both Holocaust literature and literature of Vietnam. (Different universities.) For me the instinct is the opposite, I think - I feel like there's a sort of capital W Witnessing in reading different perspectives on the events.

(I'm using my "I" words, right?"

(Um, also, to clarify: I mean different people's way of processing, handling, even making art from horror - not different perspectives as in "Was there a Holocaust.")

And now I have to say that I'm reading right now The Rape of Nanking which I wasn't going to bring up because mentioning it right now made me feel ooky like you'll think all I'm reading is about stuff like this, like some sort of gorging on tragedy or something. But for a variety of reasons what happened in Nanking is largely forgotten, to the extent it's ever been known.

IIRC, the movie ends with the breakout, and doesn't go into (other than a blurb before the credits) what happened to everyone after they made it to the woods (if they made it, instead of running over one of the land mines). One of the saddest things in the book (to me) is what happened to Leon Feldhelder (played by Alan Arkin in the movie)--he survived in hiding until the Soviets liberated that part of Poland, but when he returned to his hometown, along with the few other camp survivors from that town, they were massacred in a pogram before VE day.

A slightly more uplifting (well, revengeful) tale is of Schlomo, the young jewelrymaker who joined the partisans after escape, and then moved to Brazil after the war. When he found out in the news that one of the head SS guards from the camp had been in hiding also in Brazil and was being held for extradition around 1960, he visited him in prison and made sure that they had the right guy. They did, and then let him go (corruption and connections), but he was mysteriously killed soon after release. The author asked Schlomo about that incident, and he had nothing to say about it but definitely hinted that he might have had a hand in the death.