As a child, I was obsessed with Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Like Anne, I wanted to grow up to be a writer; like her, I kept a diary (though less faithfully), which for a time I addressed, following her model, as Kitty; like her, I agonized over how little my mother understood me and longed to swoon in a boy’s arms. My obsession peaked at the age of eight with a visit to the Secret Annexe, in Amsterdam—the warren of rooms where the Frank family hid from the Nazis. I had imagined it countless times and had the floor plan memorized, but seeing it was a shock: it was so much smaller than I had pictured.

That may have been the moment I began to understand how great was the distance between Anne’s world and my own. As a girl from a family of survivors, coming of age in nineteen-eighties America, I felt the Holocaust as a tangible presence, simultaneously inescapable and unknowable. My grandparents, Jews from Lodz who fled east when the Nazis began their advance into Poland, had better luck than many: taken prisoner by the Soviets, they spent much of the war in a Siberian labor camp. Some of their family had already made it to Palestine, but most of those who remained behind were sent first to the Lodz ghetto and then to Auschwitz. My great-grandmother died there, but my great-aunt survived.

The enormity of the losses my relatives had suffered was palpable in the deep lines around their mouths, the tremors in their hands, the sighs they heaved every time the war years came up. Once, my great-aunt, who had Alzheimer’s disease by the time I came to know her, even grabbed my arm in search of the tattoo that she thought she would find there. But they didn’t often talk in detail about their experiences. When they did, the stories they told were confusing and full of gaps, and I’d complain at having to hear them. I was terrified of my relatives’ emotion and of the crushing responsibility it inflicted on me: the paradox of being charged with remembering something I hadn’t experienced.

Reading about the Holocaust was my way of trying to fulfill that obligation. But the gaps remained. I pored over the final pages of my edition of Anne’s diary, where the facts of what happened after the police raided the Secret Annexe were stated tersely: deportation to Westerbork, Auschwitz, and, finally, Bergen-Belsen. Searching for more, I came upon a book in which Hanneli Goslar, a childhood friend of Anne’s who was interned in another section of Bergen-Belsen, recalled having caught a glimpse of her, almost unrecognizable, through a fence. She returned a few days later with a package of food, but when she threw it over the fence another woman caught it and ran away as Anne screamed. The chatty, cheerful girl had become a person I couldn’t identify with at all: skeletal, desperate, scrabbling for food. She had gone to a place I couldn’t follow, not even in my imagination.

Those who died in the camps left no testimonies, and, when I was growing up, the idea of writing imaginative literature for children about the death camps was considered almost sacrilegious. In February, 1977, The Horn Book, a magazine devoted to literature for children, published an article by Eric A. Kimmel, with the title “Confronting the Ovens.” Kimmel laid out a taxonomy for children’s literature about the Holocaust, a genre that was then in its infancy. If the Holocaust could be pictured as something like Dante’s Inferno, a descending order of circles with the crematoriums at the very bottom, the books that existed when Kimmel made his study were situated on the middle to upper rings. They told stories of resistance, of refugees, of people under occupation—but not of the camps. Kimmel could find only one such work of fiction: Marietta Moskin’s “I Am Rosemarie,” in which a girl and her family are sent to Bergen-Belsen. Yet even they are “comparatively fortunate,” Kimmel writes, as they were spared the transports east to the extermination camps. And, of course, because they survived.

Why, Kimmel wondered, had no writer for children broached “the ultimate tragedy”? He concluded that it had to do with the irreconcilable tension between the subject and our assumptions about children’s literature. To write about the Holocaust realistically, in all its horror, violates the tacit promise of writing for young readers, he maintained: “not to be too violent, too accusing, too depressing.” At the same time, a story that won’t keep young readers up at night contradicts the historical reality. Kimmel continued, “To put it simply, is mass murder a subject for a children’s novel? Five years ago, we might have said no; ten years ago we certainly would have. Now, however, I think the appearance of a novel set in the center of the lowest circle is only a matter of time.”

It took eleven years. In 1988, Jane Yolen, who is best known for picture books, including a popular series depicting dinosaurs as stand-ins for toddlers (“How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?”), published “The Devil’s Arithmetic.” In it, she came up with an ingenious solution to the problem Kimmel had identified: employing a fantastical framing device that stops the atrocities of life in an extermination camp from being utterly overwhelming for her young readers. The book’s protagonist, a rebellious American preteen named Hannah, is magically whisked back to a Polish shtetl and then, along with its residents, transported to a camp. Four years later, Yolen elaborated on the formula with “Briar Rose,” which plays with the tropes of children’s literature by using “Sleeping Beauty” as a template for a survivor’s story. Her new book, “Mapping the Bones” (Philomel), alludes to “Hansel and Gretel” as it follows two siblings from the Lodz ghetto through a period among a group of partisans and, finally, to a death camp.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the closer a work of Holocaust literature hews to reality the more effective it is in helping readers understand what really happened. But the essential difficulty in writing convincing fiction about the Holocaust is that the events are so horrific that they seem almost beyond belief. What if the best way to make them feel real is to render them through the realm of imagination? “We say to fibbing children: ‘Don’t tell fairy tales!’ ” Angela Carter once wrote. “Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be overgenerous with the truth rather than economical with it.”

Born in 1939 to a New York Jewish family, Yolen graduated from Smith College and sold her first picture book, “Pirates in Petticoats,” at age twenty-two. Nothing in her career prior to “The Devil’s Arithmetic” would have led readers to expect her to write such a book. Her output, which now numbers more than three hundred works, is long on fantasy—the “Commander Toad” series features frogs and toads having adventures in space—and explorations of the natural world. “Owl Moon” (1987), which won the Caldecott Medal, is a soothing, poetic chronicle of an owling expedition undertaken by a little girl and her father, based on the experiences of Yolen’s husband and children taking such walks. There is no fantasy and very little drama: just the child and her father, the woods, and the owl.