Abstract This article examines how Holocaust-themed children’s and crossover young-adult fiction can participate in the sustainability of Holocaust memory and support ethical education. Building on cultural memory studies, trauma and narrative ethics, and value-oriented pedagogy, the study conducts a qualitative close reading of four widely read novels: Number the Stars (Lowry), The Book Thief (Zusak), Hana (Mornštajnová), and Once (Gleitzman). The analysis operationalizes “cultural sustainability” as the continuing, critically responsible circulation of Holocaust remembrance practices across generations, especially as living testimony recedes. It identifies a recurring cluster of narrative mechanisms, particularly child focalization, strategic silence or ellipsis, temporal layering, and metafictional mediation, and shows how these shape the interpretive and ethical positions from which young readers may be invited to know, feel, and judge persecution, complicity, rescue, and survival. Importantly, the article also foregrounds tensions and risks: rescue-centered plots may shift attention from victims to helpers; esthetic or allegorical mediation may invite emotional identification while softening historical specificity; and universal ethical lessons can unintentionally eclipse the Holocaust’s antisemitic core and the plurality of Nazi victim groups. The article therefore argues not that these novels “produce” empathy in any measurable way, but that they provide structured ethical invitations and pedagogical openings that can help sustain memory when taught with contextual grounding, historical supplementation, and critical discussion.
Milan Mašát (Wed,) studied this question.