Book picks similar to
The Pirates of Cologne by Dinah R. Mack


historical-fiction
coming-of-age
fiction
nazi

The Melody of the Soul


Liz Tolsma - 2018
    The only person she has left is her beloved grandmother, and she's determined to keep her safe. But protecting Grandmother won't be easy--not with a Nazi officer billeted below them.Anna must keep a low profile. There's one thing she refuses to give up, though. Despite instruments being declared illegal, Anna defiantly continues to practice her violin. She has to believe that the war will end someday and her career will be waiting. Fortunately for Anna, the officer, Horst Engel, enjoys her soothing music. It distracts him from his dissatisfaction with Nazi ideology and reminds him that beauty still exists in an increasingly ugly world.When his neighbors face deportation, Horst is moved to risk everything to hide them. Anna finds herself falling in love with the handsome officer and his brave heart. But what he reveals to her might break her trust and stop the music forever. . . .

Samson: A Savior Will Rise


Shawn Hoffman - 2013
    So you have no other choice. . . . You must fight, Samson. You must. The year is 1941, and Samson Abrams makes a life-or-death decision that lands him, and his entire family, in the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz. When Samson is recognized by Dr. Josef Mengele and Commandant Rudolf Hoss as a former boxing champion, he is ordered box for their entertainment. A win means extra rations, but the penalty for losing is death in the gas chambers.One question haunts Samson as he and his family face one atrocity after another: Where is God in the face of such evil? An unexpected friendship between the Jewish Samson and the Polish Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe challenges Samson to examine what little is left of his faith, but will it give him strength when he needs it most?Based on true stories, "Samson: A Savior Will Rise" blends Shawn Hoffman s thorough research with a compelling narrative that provokes questions about faith, hope, and love."

Fluke: A Novel


Martin Blinder - 1998
    In America, anybody can become president. In 1920, anybody did. Harding was a strikingly handsome man, a high school graduate of impenetrable ignorance whose only two qualifications for the presidency were that he looked and sounded presidential--provided you didn't look or listen too closely. Ohio's "favorite son" at the nominating convention, he recognized his deficiencies, did not want such high office, and never expected to be nominated, no less elected. But his destiny was to become the first packaged candidate, elected largely on the strength of a carefully crafted image. Thus began 12 years of Republican rule that fostered unbridled capitalism and willful isolation, leading to the Great Depression and the rise of European dictatorships, which set the stage for World War II. Greatly complicating things was the relationship between Harding and Nan, who shared a deeper intimacy and hotter sex than anything enjoyed by more contemporary White House occupants. But woven around and through their furtive couplings is the tapestry of corruption and scandal generated by a half-dozen uniquely odious presidential cronies. But this tale is not unremittingly bleak. After having been content all of his life to just slide by, Harding reinvented himself in his last year, proving that nobility can triumph over selfishness, that listening to your heart may be more reliable than listening to your head, and that love which is pure can transcend death itself.

The Fourth Shore


Virginia Baily - 2019
    Which is how, in 1929, seventeen-year-old Liliana Cattaneo arrives there from Rome on a ship filled with eager colonists to join her brother and his new wife.Liliana is sure she was on the brink of a great adventure, but what awaits her is not the Mediterranean idyll of cocktail parties, smart dances, dashing officers and romantic intrigues she had imagined. Instead she finds a world of persecution, violence, repression, corruption and deceptions both great and small. A child of fascist Italy, blown about by the winds of fascism and Catholicism, Liliana becomes enmeshed in a dark liaison which has terrible consequences both for her and those she loves most. The Fourth Shore is the engrossing and intensely poignant story of Liliana's journey from Rome to Tripoli to a north London suburb where, as plain Lily Jones, she begins to uncover a secret she has buried so deeply that even she is far from certain what it is.

I Carried Them with Me: A Young Girl's Journey to Survive


Sara Lumer - 2016
    When she was 16 years old her parents sent her to Budapest, Hungary, where her two older brothers were already living. They felt she would be safer there. But in March of 1944 Germany invaded Hungary and began to round up all the Jews. Sara was sent to two different labor camps and endured two long death marches. She is a Holocaust Survivor.

Remembering You


Tricia Goyer - 2011
    Thirty-six-year-old Ava Andrews life interrupted by an unusual request fulfill her 83-year-old grandfather's last wish by joining him on a battle-site tour of Europe. Ava and Grandpa Jack arrive in Europe and meet up with Paul, her grandpa's best friend, and his grandson Dennis. The Dennis who just happens to be Ava's first love. Before she knows it, Ava and Dennis are swept down memory lane as they visit the sites that are discussed in the history books. While interviewing the aged soldiers, Ava finds the Jewish woman whose life her grandfather saved when she was just a small girl. As Ava begins to understand the things that made her grandfather the man he became, she's also given a second chance at love. Based on a true story, Remembering You is a moving story about how history can change our future.

The Wish Child


Catherine Chidgey - 2016
    Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Siggi lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words (“promise”, “love”, “mercy”) from books. Erich is an only child living a lush rural life near Leipzig, tending beehives, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions.Drawn together as Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city people are talking of surrender. The days Siggi and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.Watching over Siggi and Erich is the wish child, the mysterious narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the wreckage of a nation’s dream.

One Girl in Auschwitz: A WW2 Jewish Girl's Holocaust Survival True Story


Sara Leibovits - 2020
    Holocaust biography

The Ventriloquists


E.R. Ramzipoor - 2019
    Engrossing.” — Booklist , starred reviewIn this triumphant debut inspired by true events, a ragtag gang of journalists and resistance fighters risk everything for an elaborate scheme to undermine the Reich.The Nazis stole their voices. But they would not be silenced.Brussels, 1943. Twelve-year-old street orphan Helene survives by living as a boy and selling copies of the country’s most popular newspaper, Le Soir, now turned into Nazi propaganda. Helene’s world changes when she befriends a rogue journalist, Marc Aubrion, who draws her into a secret network that publishes dissident underground newspapers.The Nazis track down Aubrion’s team and give them an impossible choice: turn the resistance newspapers into a Nazi propaganda bomb that will sway public opinion against the Allies, or be killed. Faced with no decision at all, Aubrion has a brilliant idea. While pretending to do the Nazis’ bidding, they will instead publish a fake edition of Le Soir that pokes fun at Hitler and Stalin—daring to laugh in the face of their oppressors.The ventriloquists have agreed to die for a joke, and they have only eighteen days to tell it.Featuring an unforgettable cast of characters and stunning historical detail, E.R. Ramzipoor’s dazzling debut novel illuminates the extraordinary acts of courage by ordinary people forgotten by time. It is a moving and powerful ode to the importance of the written word and to the unlikely heroes who went to extreme lengths to orchestrate the most stunning feat of journalism in modern history.

Consequences


Penelope Lively - 2007
    James's Park begins young Lorna and Matt's intense relationship. Wholly in love, they leave London for a cottage in a rural Somerset village. Their intimate life together—--Matt’'s woodcarving, Lorna's self-discovery, their new baby, Molly—--is shattered with the arrival of World War II. In 1960s London, Molly happens upon a forgotten newspaper--—a seemingly small moment that leads to her first job and, eventually, a pregnancy by a wealthy man who wants to marry her but whom she does not love. Thirty years later, Ruth, who has always considered her existence a peculiar accident, questions her own marriage and begins a journey that takes her back to 1941 —and a redefinition of herself and of love. Told in Lively's incomparable prose, Consequences is a powerful story of growth, death, and rebirth and a study of the previous century--—its major and minor events, its shaping of public consciousness, and its changing of lives.

The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich's Press Chief


Otto Dietrich - 2010
    Only at the end, when I watched the inglorious collapse and the obstinacy of his final downfall, was I able suddenly to fit together the bits of mosaic I had been amassing for twelve years into a complete picture of his opaque and sphinx like personality. If my contemporaries fail to understand me, those who came after will surely profit from this account.”—Otto Dietrich When Otto Dietrich was invited in 1933 to become Adolf Hitler’s press chief, he accepted with the simple uncritical conviction that Adolf Hitler was a great man, dedicated to promoting peace and welfare for the German people. At the end of the war, imprisoned and disillusioned, Otto Dietrich sat down to write what he had seen and heard in twelve years of the closest association with Hitler, requesting that it be published after his death. Dietrich’s role placed him in a privileged position. He was hired by Hitler in 1933, was his confidant until 1945, and he worked—and clashed—with Joseph Goebbels. His direct, personal experience of life at the heat of the Reich makes for compelling reading.

Loot


Aaron Elkins - 1999
    With the Allies closing in and chaos erupting, a single truck silently disappears into a mountain snowstorm with its cargo of stolen masterpieces. Fifty years later, in a seedy Boston pawnshop, one of the truck's paintings surfaces at last, pawned for $100 by a smalltime Russian thug. The next day, the shop owner, Simeon Pawlovsky, himself a Nazi death camp survivor, is dead, the life brutally beaten out of him. The painting is gone. And the chase begins.Ex-curator Benjamin Revere, haunted by his failure to save his elderly friend Simeon, is determined to track down the killer by following the missing painting's trail. But the twisting path is a bewildering and dangerous one that winds through Europe's major cities...and back five decades to a time when Hitler's hated minions looted at will. Soon Ben finds himself caught up in the tangled roots of a conspiracy of greed, lies, hatred, and blood—and imperiled by the half-century-old enigma of the vanished truck and its priceless legacy.

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.

Girl at the Edge of Sky


Lilian Nattel - 2019
    From the bestselling author of Web of Angels and The River Midnight . Lily Litvyak is no one's idea of a fighter pilot: a tiny, dimpled teenager with golden curls who lied about her age in order to fly. But in the crucible of the air war against the German invaders, she becomes that rare thing--a flying ace, glorified at home and around the world as the White Lily of Stalingrad. The real Lily disappeared in combat in August 1943, and the facts of her life are slim, but they have inspired Lilian Nattel's indelible portrait of a courageous young woman driven by family secrets to become an unlikely war hero. Even more powerfully, Nattel takes another big leap, asking the compelling question: what if Lily survived that last crash and became a prisoner of the Germans? Lily lives in a world of horrifying risk, where the life and death stakes are high in the air, but also on the ground. In the Soviet system, everyone is an informer, even your best friend. Lily lives in constant fear that she will be found out, arrested and executed as the daughter of an "enemy of the people." When she ends up a German prisoner, as a Soviet officer and a Jew, the need for deception becomes even more desperate. Girl at the Edge of Sky is a masterwork of the imagination, subtle and bold all at once, bringing us deep into the precarious life of a remarkable woman who lies to fight for the country that would disown her, and then lies to survive the enemy that would annihilate her.

Mortar Gunner on the Eastern Front: The Memoir of Dr Hans Rehfeldt. Volume 1: From the Moscow Winter Offensive to Operation Zitadelle


Hans Heinz Rehfeldt - 2008
    Battling in freezing conditions, at its lowest -52℃, the descriptions of the privations are vivid and terrifying. With no winter clothes they resorted to using those taken from Soviet corpses.In 1942, fighting near Oriel, however, his battalion suffered heavy losses and was disbanded. Ill with frostbitten legs, Rehfeldt was treated in hospital and once recovered was dispatched to the Front.Following various battles (Werch, Bolchov) his battalion again suffered heavy losses and it merged. In agony from severe frostbite to his legs, Rehfeldt defied the odds and astonished his surgeon when he walked again. He was promoted from Gunner to Trained Private Soldier in 1942, and to Corporal for bravery in the field in 1943.He was awarded numerous honors including the Wound Badge and the Infantry Assault Badge.On 3 May 1945 he was captured by US Forces and held as POW for one month in a camp at Waschow before internment in Holstein from where he was released in July 1945 after agreeing to work on the land. In December 1945 he began studying veterinary medicine: his future career.This astonishing account of a man who kept bouncing back from near death is a testament to the author’s determination and sheer strength of spirit.