The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank (1947)
“A thirteen-year-old girl hiding from the Nazis wrote the most read diary in human history — and never knew it.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Night
Elie Wiesel
The other foundational Holocaust witness text — written in retrospect by a survivor, stripping language to its barest minimum where Anne's expands and philosophizes. Read together, they define the genre's range.
Maus
Art Spiegelman
A son interviews his Holocaust-survivor father and turns it into a graphic novel. Where Anne's diary is primary witness, Maus examines what survives in memory and what it costs the next generation.
The Hiding Place
Corrie ten Boom
A Dutch Christian who hid Jewish families during the occupation — the perspective of the helpers, telling the same story from the outside.
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
A fictional account of Danish Jews during WWII, written for middle school readers — often paired with Anne Frank in curricula as an accessible entry into Holocaust literature.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne
A fictional Holocaust narrative from a child's perspective — frequently read alongside Anne Frank, though it takes a very different and more controversial approach to the material.
The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
A coming-of-age memoir under political oppression (the Iranian Revolution) with the same wry self-awareness and same dual consciousness — the child surviving history while also just trying to be a person.