Book picks similar to
Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 by Götz Aly
history
holocaust
non-fiction
nonfiction
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz
Rudolf Höss - 1956
Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss’s autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial. This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.
Until We Meet Again: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Holocaust
Michael Korenblit - 1983
A small town in Poland. Two Jewish families flee to hiding places, hoping to evade deportation by the Nazis. At the last moment, 17-year old Manya makes the heart wrenching decision to leave her family and join her sweetheart, Meyer, also 17, with his family. For three long years, Manya and Meyer endure the loss of their parents and siblings, separation from each other, and the horror of concentration camps, including Aushwitz-but are helped at key points by courageous Polish Catholics and are constantly sustained by their faith and their love for each other. Co-authored by the couple's son Michael, this absorbing and suspenseful narrative reads like a novel, yet tells a true story of love and horror, sacrifice and courage, with a conclusion that is truly miraculous.
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz
Olga Lengyel - 1947
This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau. Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, Five Chimneys does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". This book is a necessary reminder of one of the ugliest chapters in the history of human civilization. It was a shocking experience. It is a shocking book.
And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
Jacques Lusseyran - 1963
He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.* Chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century by a jury of writers including Harold Kushner, Thomas Moore, Huston Smith, and Natalie Goldberg* This fourth edition includes a new insert of photographs“One of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever encountered...[Lusseyran’s] experience is thrilling, horrible, honest, spiritually profound, and utterly full of joy.”— Ethan Hawke, in the Village Voice
Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz
Lucette Matalon Lagnado - 1991
In this remarkable narrative, the life of Auschwitz's Angel of Death is told in counterpoint to the lives of the survivors, who until now have kept silent about their heinous death-camp ordeals.
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.
In the Mouth of the Wolf
Rose Zar - 1983
Her father urged her to save herself by hiding "in the mouth of the wolf"--or within the enemy itself. She managed to obtain false papers, secretly changing her identity and surviving the Holocaust as maid and nanny for a Nazi SS colonel.
Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora
Pierre Berg - 2008
He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he managed to survive...and ultimately got out alive. "As far as I'm concerned," says Berg, "it was all shithouse luck, which is to say--inelegantly--that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life."Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, "Scheisshaus Luck" recounts Berg's constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg's time in Auschwitz, his hair's breadth avoidance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing "death march" out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis' V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces.Utterly frank and tinged with irony, irreverence, and gallows humor, " Scheisshaus Luck" ranks in importance among the work of fellow survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazi's "Final Solution," Berg's memoir stands as a searing reminder of how the Holocaust affected us all.
Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944
Aranka Siegal - 1981
Upon the Head of the Goat is the winner of the 1982 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and a 1982 Newbery Honor Book.“This is a book that should be read by all those interested in the Holocaust and what it did to young and old.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer
Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journal
Renia Spiegel - 2016
In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland.Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry. Her diary records how she grew up, fell in love, and was rounded up by the invading Nazis and forced to move to the ghetto in Przemsyl with all the other Jews. By luck, Renia's boyfriend Zygmund was able to find a tenement for Renia to hide in with his parents and took her out of the ghetto. This is all described in the Diary, as well as the tragedies that befell her family and her ultimate fate in 1942, as written in by Zygmund on the Diary's final page.Renia's Diary is a significant historical and psychological document. The raw, yet beautiful account depicts Renia's angst over the horrors going on around her. It has been translated from the original Polish, with notes included by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak.
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.
Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk - 1985
I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner. But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination.Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz.From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities.The original Polish manuscript was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn in 1980 in the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective.
The White Mouse
Nancy Wake - 1985
Nancy Wake, a New Zealander who became one of the most highly decorated women of WW II, here she tells her own story.
Two Rings: A Story of Love and War
Millie Werber - 2012
Born in central Poland in the town of Radom, she found herself trapped in the ghetto at the age of fourteen, a slave laborer in an armaments factory in the summer of 1942, transported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, before being marched to a second armaments factory. She faced death many times; indeed she was certain that she would not survive. But she did. Many years later, when she began to share her past with Eve Keller, the two women rediscovered the world of the teenage girl Millie had been during the war. Most important, Millie revealed her most precious private memory: of a man to whom she was married for a few brief months. He was -- if not the love of her life -- her first great unconditional passion. He died, leaving Millie with a single photograph taken on their wedding day, and two rings of gold that affirm the presence of a great passion in the bleakest imaginable time.
When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains
Ariana Neumann - 2020
He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. When Time Stopped is a detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.