January 27 this year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and the day designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember those who died in the Holocaust. Decades after that liberation, there is a steady outpouring of worthwhile nonfiction on the Shoah, some based on newly unclassified information and newly discovered archives, others focused on family stories that are just coming to light, or memoirs published with increasing urgency by the remaining survivors. These books can astonish in their details and prove that there are many stories still to be told.

Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft (Ben Yehuda Press)

Menachem Rosensaft’s 150 soulful poems, set in the style of the Book of Psalms, reflect on events of the Holocaust and the possibility of belief in its wake. The son of survivors, Rosensaft imagines in some of the poems the voice of his older brother, who was murdered by the Nazis. Burning Psalms doesn’t offer comfort, but rather questions and rebukes. In the book’s coda, Rosensaft, a lawyer who teaches about genocide, includes poems addressing contemporary tragedies, including the 1995 genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis
By Debórah Dwork (W.W. Norton)

These are five courageous, inspiring stories of Americans—including Quakers, Unitarians and Jews, several of them women—who worked behind the scenes in Europe and China to save lives, often acting clandestinely and taking great risks to achieve their goals. Historian Debórah Dwork raises timely questions about current policy toward refugees and asylum seekers. She is the author of several noted books on the Holocaust and director of CUNY’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity. 

The Survivor: How I Made It Through Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter
By Josef Lewkowicz with Michael Calvin (Harper Horizon)

The memoirist is a 97-year-old survivor of the Shoah. Josef Lewkowicz, born in Dzialoszyce, Poland, was sent to six different concentration camps over three years; his entire extended family was murdered by the Nazis. Surviving against all odds, he later served as a United States Army intelligence officer searching postwar for Nazis in hiding. His harrowing memories are layered with the positive outlook and resilience he achieved in later years. “Choose life. Choose goodness,” he writes.

Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship, and Betrayal
By Matthew Goodman (Ballantine Books)

Matthew Goodman uncovers the complete story behind Paris-Underground, a 1943 best seller and film about two unlikely heroes, Etta Shiber and Kate Bonnefous—the first an American Jew and the other an Englishwoman, both in their 50s—who did pioneering work for the French Resistance in Paris. Among their accomplishments was establishing a network of routes and safe houses to help escapees. Both were caught by the Gestapo and jailed, but survived—and never spoke to each other again. The 1943 book was ghostwritten, told from the point of view of Shiber and, as Goodman learned, full of untruths and dangerous assertions. The corrected true story is one of courage and a painful legacy.

Two Sisters: Betrayal, Love, and Resistance in Wartime France 
By Rosie Whitehouse (Union Square & Co.)

Rosie Whitehouse’s mother-in-law, Huguette Müller, and Müller’s sister, Marion, managed to survive in Vichy France with the help of a non-Jewish doctor, Frédéric Pétri, in a small village in the French Alps. In winter 1943, after their mother was taken to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, one of the sisters broke her leg as they were escaping. The doctor risked his life and that of his family to heal and help them. Whitehouse, a London journalist, learned details of the sisters’ dangerous journey as well as facts about complicity in the village, and ultimately succeeded in having the doctor recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations. A work of memory and memorial, it is also the story of Jewish involvement in the French Resistance.

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Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.