• The classic autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) is a thoughtful telling of Douglass’s life first as a slave and then as an abolitionist in America. Despite suffering extreme oppression and humiliation, he was determined to become educated so he could be a leader for his people. His recollections of his past are marked by keen observations and a striking ability to recognize hypocrisy and abuse of power.

• Anne Frank’s diary, published as The Diary of a Young Girl (1952), is often discussed in the context of Klemperer’s diary. Frank was a teenage Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family and four other people in Amsterdam after the Nazis occupied Holland. It has become a classic in young adult nonfiction.

• Thomas Keneally’s moving novel Schindler’s List (1993) is based on the true story of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who was so horrified by the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews that he employed thirteen hundred Jews in a manufacturing facility. At great personal and financial risk, he remained dedicated to saving as many Jews as he could.

• Nora Levin’s Holocaust Years: The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (1968) remains one of the key studies of the Nazi persecution of the Jews from the year of Hitler’s rise to power through the end of World War II.

• The philosophical question at the center of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1998) is whether evil can be forgiven. The author recalls his experience in a concentration camp and the day a dying Nazi soldier asks him to forgive the evils done to the Jews. Over fifty great thinkers, including the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, address this difficult question.