I use the term Shoah because I find it better at avoiding the 'Gentile gaze' -- the fact that literature about the Holocaust is written predominantly by and for Gentiles, who have a vested interest in whitewashing their involvement and making it as much as possible into a feel-good story for them (see the popularity of Anne Frank's narrative which the Gentile 'savior' can fling about). Shoah is a term by and for Jews.
This will not discuss the Porajmos, or Romani Holocaust, as I am not Romani and that is not my place. In addition, I do not know enough about the sadly long history of anti-Romani stereotypes to trust my ability to accurately detect bad sources in the way I believe I can with Jewish sources.
I have not read many of these books. I am going based on my own assessments of their summary, others' assessments (awards? good reviews?) and other information. It is possible a Shoah-denying, distorting or minimizing book slips through the cracks. My sincere apologies if that happens, and please bring it to my attention.
This is quite disorganized as of now. I'll try to get it better done later. For now my focus is on gathering.
Legal note: You might get in trouble for downloading this. I don't know. This might fall under the 'educational' exception of the fair use laws in the US, and nonfiction works are generally given slightly more flexibility than fiction. Very few of these are public domain; if this had been the original US copyright law, of course, anything before about 1996 would be and the vast majority of things before 2011, but thanks in no small part to Mickey Mouse, it's not.
With that said:
Memory of the World: A Mortuary of Books, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust ,
Saving One's Own, in EPUB or PDF format, from Anna's Archive, by Mordechai Paldiel . You know how we always hear the story of the Righteous Gentiles? Well, what about the righteous Jews?
This one is massive but it's worth noting: the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project. Essentially, translations, partially or fully, from thousands of towns, running the gamut from tiny places like Smorgon, Volozhin, Ilya, or Orhei (my family's from there) to big cities like Bialystok, Kishinev, Siedlce, Kamianetz-Podilsky, Lviv, Iasi, Kremenets, Belz, Lodz, Dnipro, or Pinsk. They even have several for Chelm (it's a real town!) There is an Ashkenazi focus, of course, but they do have for Sephardic areas like Florina and Salonika in Greece. The books range from essentially tables of contents, to encyclopedias, to lists of names, to beautiful and haunting, although everything is, in all honesty. The big city translations are surprisingly skimpy due to their length. There is also a tendency towards unequal coverage. For no earthly reason (so far as I can tell), the tiny Ukrainian town of Glinyany has no less than FIVE active, partial, or complete yizkor books about it. Kremenets, although bigger, also has a disproportionate collection. Regardless: JewishGen Yizkor Books Their KehilaLinks project is broader: KehilaLinks If you're looking for information on Lithuania or Belarus Eilat Gordin Levitan is excellent.
The NLI, or National Library of Israel, serves a double role as Jewish library. And my god, it is impressive. Thousands of books, many in English, freely accessible online. The astounding Historical Jewish Press collection, which spans from 1783 to 2025 in twenty-four languages and, seemingly, almost every country: Suriname, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Jamaica. There's a Hebrew nespaper in late-1700s Poland, a Ladino newspaper in the US in the twenties. There are Russian-Jewish papers in China, multiple Yiddish ones in Cuba, an Iranian Yiddish paper, a paper from the Dominican Republic, two different nineteenth-century Tunisian papers, one in Indonesia. And they've got big ones, too: Farvarts, Di Arbeiter Tsaytung, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, The Israelite (predecessor to The American Israelite), and so on.