Book picks similar to
Life Goes On by Hans Keilson


fiction
history
historical-fiction
germany

My Name Is Asher Lev


Chaim Potok - 1972
    Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

A Tale of Love and Darkness


Amos Oz - 2002
    The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.(back cover)

The Innocent


Ian McEwan - 1990
    The protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is a 25-year-old, naive, unsophisticated English post office technician who is astonished and alarmed to find himself involved in a top-secret operation. At the same time that he loses his political innocence, Leonard experiences his sexual initiation in a clandestine affair with a German divorcee five years his senior. As his two secret worlds come together, events develop into a gruesome nightmare, building to a searing, unforgettable scene of surrealist intensity in which Leonard and his lover try to conceal evidence of a murder. Acting to save himself from a prison sentence, Leonard desperately performs an act of espionage whose ironic consequences resonate down the years to a twister of an ending. Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study--of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances, and of differences in national character: the gentlemanly Brits, all decorum and civility; the brash, impatient Americans; the cynical Germans. McEwan's neat, tensile prose raises this book to the highest level of the genre.

Destined to Live: One Woman's War, Life, Loves Remembered


Sabina Wolanski - 2008
    In her diary, along with innocent adolescent longings, she recorded what happened next: the humiliations and terrors, the murder of her beloved family and the startling story of her own survival. Leaving Europe after the war, Sabina forged a new life in Australia, juggling a thriving design business, her family, and an unorthodox love life. But as time wore on, she began asking herself why had she survived when so many died? And what kind of justice fitted such crimes? In May 2005, when Germany opened its controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, Sabina was chosen to speak as the voice of the six million dead. In her speech she noted that although the Holocaust had taken everything she valued, it had also taught her that hatred and discrimination are doomed to fail. Her ability to survive, to love, and to live well, has been her greatest triumph. 'I couldn't put down this engaging, honest story of love, loss and survival.' Diane Armstrong, bestselling author of THE VOYAGER OF THEIR LIFE 'important and wonderfully written' Australian Literary Review

The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw


Eva Weaver - 2013
    He becomes a puppeteer in the Warsaw ghetto, but when his talent is discovered, Mika is forced to entertain the occupying German troops instead of his countrymen.It is also the story of Max, a German soldier stationed in Warsaw, whose experiences in Poland and later in Siberia's Gulag show a different side to the Second World War. As one of Mika's puppets is passed to the soldier, a war-torn legacy is handed from one generation to another.

Traitor's Gate


Michael Ridpath - 2013
    Franco's bloody insurrection taught this Englishman all about hell. Arriving in his mother's country, the now Nazi Germany, Conrad is sick at heart. Even Berlin - infamous haven of decadence and vice - salutes fascism. Himmler's black-shirted troops rule the city, and every German arm bears a Swastika. But does every German heart belong to Hitler? When Conrad is arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of spying, he is rescued by Theo, an old friend from university, now a lieutenant of the Wehrmacht. Together they are drawn into a world of danger and deceit, of plots, paranoia and intrigue where the brave few are united by a single ambition: to free the fatherland from the Führer.

Sabina: In the Eye of the Storm


Bella Kuligowska Zucker - 2018
    In September 1939, Bella was a carefree teenager living in Poland when the German army struck. She was rounded up with her friends and family and sent to a series of grim Jewish ghettos. After loved ones were separated and lost through the war years, Bella survived by changing her identity. Narrowly escaping death each time, she moved from place to place, odd job to odd job, new name to new name. After finding the birth certificate of a Catholic girl five years her senior, she became Sabina Mazurek. Then she went into the eye of the storm, Germany, where she believed she might be safest. "Sabina is her story. As in "Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank and "Night" by Elie Wiesel, Bella Kuligowska marshaled unexpected resources to manage as a teen during the horrors of World War II. Sabina offers a different perspective on how many Jews survived outside of the concentration camps, in more familiar yet infinitely hostile settings, with the help of others along the way.

WASP Sting


Lee A. Sweetapple - 2016
    As a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP), Trudy is one of the most knowledgeable flyers of the P-51 Mustang. She is in full command of one of the fastest airplanes ever made, but she is forbidden from going into combat because of her gender. Trudy is shocked when her dream of going to the front lines is fulfilled. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) needs a pilot to sneak into German-occupied Lithuania and rescue a professor whose work could have international implications. But first, Trudy will have to get there. As Trudy crosses the United States and Canada with her handsome traveling partner, Major Rod Jackson, she sees the many different ways Americans and Canadians are helping on the home front. Her new base of operations in Duxford, England, will also give her a front-row seat to the violent, deadly aerial battles of the European theater. Trudy is determined to fight to protect the Allies, but will she make it out of her first operation alive?

The Nazi's Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather was a War Criminal


Silvia Foti - 2021
    Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.

Remember Your Name


Erik G. LeMoullec - 2014
    Medallion. While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood. From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Gorlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Liberated at sixteen, he took on smuggling as a means to survive. It was not until the Bricha approached him and he became a lead operative - smuggling thousands of refugees across country borders - that he was finally able to begin his life again. Teddy's story is one of survival amidst horrific circumstances. The author does not sensationalize the suffering his grandfather and his family endured, but in this work of narrative nonfiction simply recreates this remarkable man's early life during one of the darkest moments of human history.

Farewell to Prague


Miriam Darvas - 2001
    It is the story of a girl who, at the age of six, witnesses a murder being committed by German Storm Troopers. From that moment, the happy life she has known disintegrates. Her family escapes to Prague, where they create a new life. Six years later, the Germans march into Prague. Now she has to escape to England alone and on foot. She walks across the snow-covered Tatra Mountains. By train, fishing boat, and ship, she finally manages to get to England. She comes of age there during the bombing of London. When the war ends, she immediately returns to the Continent to discover the fate of her family. Farewell to Prague is a gripping true story that will fascinate and inspire readers of all ages.

The Dust That Falls from Dreams


Louis de Bernières - 2015
    But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?Louis de Bernières’ magnificent and moving novel follows the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters as the Edwardian age disintegrates into the Great War, and they strike out to seek what happiness can be salvaged from the ruins of the old world.

The Two Hotel Francforts


David Leavitt - 2013
    Awaiting safe passage to New York on the SS Manhattan, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, sophisticated, independently wealthy, bohemian, and beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class. As Portugal's neutrality, and the world's future, hang in the balance, the hidden threads in the lives of these four characters—Julia's status as a Jew, Pete and Edward's improbable affair, Iris's increasingly desperate efforts to save her tenuous marriage—begin to come loose. This journey will change their lives irrevocably, as Europe sinks into war.Gorgeously written, sexually and politically charged, David Leavitt's long-awaited new novel is an extraordinary work.

Goodbye for Now


M.J. Hollows - 2018
    Refusing to fight, Joe stays behind as a conscientious objector battling against the propaganda.On the Western front, George soon discovers that war is not the great adventure he was led to believe. Surrounded by mud, blood and horror his mindset begins to shift as he questions everything he was once sure of.At home in Liverpool, Joe has his own war to win. Judged and imprisoned for his cowardice, he is determined to stand by his convictions, no matter the cost.By the end of The Great War only one brother will survive, but which?

Hitler's Brothel


Steve Matthews - 2020
    Ania is imprisoned and forced to endure the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. Danuta’s search for her sister leads her into the dangers of the Polish Underground. Each will do what they must to survive long enough to find each other. Their dream of being reunited is crushed in shocking circumstances.In an astonishing twist of fate, the opportunity for revenge presents itself 60 years later. But faced with the ultimate decision what will be the outcome ... seek justice or revenge? Spanning decades, Hitler’s Brothel is a tragic and gripping tale of deception, courage and survival.