Holocaust Unit: Tiered Titles 

Reading level: Grades 7–8

Wiesel's account of his imprisonment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald is the anchor nonfiction text of the unit. Its spare, first-person prose gives students a direct, unmediated encounter with the Holocaust without the distance of a novelized retelling.

• Short chapters and restrained language make it manageable for below-grade-level readers, while its content rewards close analysis from stronger readers — useful for a mixed-level book club group.

• As a memoir, it grounds every Bridge Builder and Researcher role in an authentic, verifiable historical account rather than fiction, which strengthens text-to-world connections.

• Widely taught at this grade band nationally, so ample teacher-vetted support material exists if a group needs it.

Nonfiction

Reading level: Grades 7–8

Ten Boom's account of her family's work hiding Jewish refugees in the Netherlands, and her subsequent imprisonment, offers students a nonfiction perspective centered on rescuers rather than only victims.

• Introduces the moral question of complicity and courage from the vantage point of a non-Jewish family risking everything, a different angle than Night, useful for whole-class discussion when groups reconvene.

• Its faith-centered narrative gives students in a Christian school context language for discussing conscience and moral conviction that connects naturally to the unit's ethical questions.

• Longer than Night, giving stronger readers a text with more room for the Researcher role to dig into occupied Netherlands, the Dutch resistance, and Ravensbrück.

Nonfiction

Reading level: Grades 6–7 (accessible entry point)

A contemporary Jewish girl is transported back in time to a 1940s Polish village and deported to a concentration camp, experiencing the Holocaust as if it were her own memory.

• The time-slip device gives readers who are new to Holocaust literature an accessible bridge between their own world and the historical setting, making it the strongest on-ramp for below-grade-level readers.

• Shorter and more straightforward than Sarah's Key or The Book Thief, useful for a group that needs a manageable six-week pace without sacrificing depth of content.

• Centers a young protagonist close in age to students, which tends to produce strong Bridge Builder text-to-self connections.

Fiction

Reading level: Grades 8–9 (accessible to strong 7th graders)

Zusak's novel, narrated by Death and set in Nazi Germany, follows a foster child who steals books as a means of survival and meaning-making.

• Its unusual narration (Death as narrator) gives the Word Wizard role rich, unusual diction and figurative language to analyze, more than a conventional narrative typically offers.

• Centers a German civilian family rather than a Jewish victim or American liberator, broadening the unit's perspective to include the experience of ordinary Germans living under the regime.

• Longer and more complex than the nonfiction options, appropriate as a stretch text for advanced 7th graders and a standard text for 8th graders.

Fiction

Reading level: Grade 8 — higher-level students only (mature 8th graders)

A dual-timeline novel connecting a 1942 French Jewish family caught in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup to a present-day journalist uncovering their story.

• The dual timeline models text-to-world and text-to-self connection directly in its structure, which makes the Bridge Builder role especially productive for this title.

• Covers the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, an aspect of French collaboration less familiar to students than German-centered accounts, broadening the unit's historical scope.

• Contains more mature content than the other four titles (a child's death, a strained marriage) and is best reserved for 8th grade or matched to a mature reader within a mixed group.

Fiction

Reading level: Higher-level students only - Grade 9+ in its original form

The true story of Jan and Antonina Żabiński, Warsaw zoo directors who hid over 300 Jewish refugees in the zoo's empty animal enclosures and their family villa during the German occupation.

• • A genuinely remarkable rescuer narrative, similar in spirit to The Hiding Place, with the added angle of the zoo setting and human/animal parallels the Nazi regime itself drew on.

Important consideration: Ackerman's original text is written for an adult audience (Accelerated Reader level 9.3) in a dense, literary, occasionally non-linear style with frequent digressions into natural history. 

• • As written, it is a reach for independent 7th/8th grade reading without significant scaffolding or excerpting.

Nonfiction

Reading level: Higher-level students only (see consideration below)

A German boy befriends a Jewish boy through the fence of a concentration camp, unaware of what the camp actually is.

• Short, simple prose that reads easily, but placed with higher-level students here because using it responsibly requires the historical literacy to recognize what the book gets wrong, not because the text itself is hard to read.

Important consideration: Holocaust historians and institutions, including the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum, have publicly criticized the book for historical inaccuracies (a Jewish child could not have survived unsupervised at the fence line as depicted) and for centering the tragedy on a German child's death rather than the Jewish victims of the genocide. Research studies of students who read it have found many come away believing it is a true story, and some absorb the mistaken idea that ordinary Germans were largely unaware of the Holocaust.

• • If used, it works best paired explicitly with a nonfiction title (Night or The Hiding Place) and a direct classroom conversation naming which parts of the book are invented.

Fiction