There are some historical periods that inspire writers, poets and scholars more than others, and the Second World is certainly one of these. The Second World War has affected many peoples for many years, and what happened during this span of time – from Nazi concentration camps to bloody battles like the battles of Monte Cassino – along with the serious consequences deriving from that in terms of deaths, poverty and destructions – cannot but have seriously affected not only the people who personally experienced that period, but also the people who came after that, and whom were only told about what happened in those years.
The people who have written about the second World War, indeed, are not only people who lived in that period and who went through the tragic experience of war: there are many books that have been recently published and that were written by writers that in some cases were not even born when the war finished. This is a clear evidence of how deep are the wounds left by the Second World War in our collective memory.
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Another interesting fact to take into consideration while dealing with books regarding the Second World War is that many of these writings were not written by professional writers, but by common people that personally experienced living during the war and that felt they had to write about that. The most famous example in this sense in probably Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, a book that most of us have read and that was not a writing meant to be published, but a simple diary written by a young girl and which turned out to be an important evidence of the horrors of war just after her death in a concentration camp and after the diary was found by her father.
Apart from this book, which is probably one of the most famous ones about the Second World War, there are also many other writings dealing with the direct experience of people during the war, most notably in the concentration camps. One of the most famous examples in this sense is If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, a book that reveals the atrocities of Auschwitz and that was written by an important and well-known Italian writer. Also Jurek Becker lived in a concentration camp during the war, and this experience was the basis for his book Jacob the Liar. But unlike Primo Levi's work, Jacob the Liar was not based on a true story: it is a novel set in a concentration camp, but the story was invented by the author. In any case, we can say that the experience of war and of concentration camps moved both authors to write a book about that.
As said, there are also books that have not been written by people that lived during the war, but also by people that were born after that. Long after that, in some cases: consider for example the recent book written by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is illuminated. The American writer, born in 1977, wrote this book, which is his first one, in 2002, almost sixty years after the end of the war.
