Other children’s books which tackle the painful and emotional subject of World War II include Jane Yolen’s 1988 novel
The Devil’s Arithmetic, in which a Jewish girl growing up in the 1980s, apathetic towards her family’s religious traditions, is flung backwards in time and experiences the Holocaust. Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel
The Book Thief also focuses on a young Gentile girl, Liesel, whose foster parents shelter and hide a young Jewish neighbor.
The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most famous pieces of literature of the Holocaust, a true story
assembled from the writings of the young Anne Frank, whose family was hidden by neighbors during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands. Anne, however, was not as lucky as the fictional Ellen from
Number the Stars—Anne’s family was captured, and the young Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, shortly before the end of the war and the liberation of the prisoners held there.