The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What literary works related to the Holocaust have you heard of or read? Try to think of at least three.

Teaching Suggestion: Fiction, nonfiction, theater, and poetry have all explored the Holocaust extensively: Some of the more famous works include Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, but there are many others. Use students’ responses to spark discussion about how literature tries to represent the Holocaust and perhaps whether such representation is even possible or desirable (critical theorist Theodor Adorno famously remarked that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” although he tempered this pronouncement elsewhere).

• “Holocaust Literature”: an essay by Sara R. Horowitz at the Jewish Women’s Archive focusing on women’s Holocaust writing
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