Book picks similar to
A Family Divided by Dick Parsons
historical-fiction
contemporary
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history
Chocolate Cake With Hitler
Emma Craigie - 2010
He wants his photograph taken with me too. "You, Helga Goebbels, are my favourite girl in the whole world," he says. "If only you were 20 years older!" He leans over me, his smell like the furniture in the servants' quarters. The photographer is laughing. Papa is laughing. But I don't take any notice. I turn right away and stare at the camera.Chocolate Cake with Hitler tells the remarkable story of Helga Goebbels, twelve-year-old daughter of the Nazi Party's head of propaganda, who spent the last ten days of her life cooped up in Adolf Hitler's bunker in Berlin.As defeat closes in on the Germans, life in the bunker becomes increasingly fraught. There's chocolate cake every day for tea with Uncle 'Leader', but Helga cannot help noticing that all is not well among the grown-ups. Her parents grow more and more distracted and tense, the bunker grows daily more empty and, as even the soldiers who have been guarding them take their leave, Helga is faced with a terrible truth. Perhaps her golden childhood has not been all that it seemed...
A Feast in the Garden
George Konrád - 1986
I am writing my most hazardous book, says George Konrad. I have been sentenced to examine myself. The result is a rich, poetic story of a man, a family, and a country--a vital and sensuous story from the president of International PEN."
Operation Einstein
Mark A. Cooper - 2011
Torn between patriotism for the country they love and their own rights and freedoms they have to try and do the unthinkable, but with the Gestapo and Hitler Youth hot on their trail, is it too late?
Promise
Eva Schloss - 2006
Written specially for children, Eva describes her happy early childhood in Vienna with her kind and loving parents and her older brother Heinz, whom she adored. But when the Nazis marched into Austria everything changed. Eva's family fled to Belgium, then to Amsterdam where, with the help of the Dutch Resistance, they spent the next two years in hiding - Eva and her mother in one house, and her father and brother in another. Finally, though, they were all betrayed and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Despite the horrors of the camp, Eva's positive attitude and stubborn personality (which had often got her into trouble) saw her through one of the most tragic events in history and she and her mother eventually returned to Amsterdam. Sadly her father and brother perished just weeks before the liberation.Eva and her mother went back to the house where Heinz and his father had hidden, for Eva had remembered that Heinz had told her he had hidden his paintings beneath the floorboards there. Sure enough, there were over thirty beautiful paintings. Heinz hadn't wasted any of his talents during his captivity. For Eva, here was a tangible, everlasting memory of her brother and a reminder of her father's promise that all the good things you accomplish will make a difference to someone, and your achievements will be carried on. Heinz's paintings have been on display in exhibitions in the USA and are now a part of a permanent exhibition in Amsterdam's war museum. Told simply and clearly for younger readers, "The Promise" is an unforgettable story, written by Eva Schloss, the step-daughter of Otto Frank and Barbara Powers, Eva's very close friend.
Among the Reeds: The True Story of How a Family Survived the Holocaust
Tammy Bottner - 2017
The strange thing is, these experiences didn’t happen to her. They happened to her grandmother decades earlier and thousands of miles away.Back in Belgium, Grandma Melly made unthinkable choices in order to save her family during WWII, including sending her two-year-old son, Bottner’s father, into hiding in a lonely Belgian convent. Did the trauma that Tammy Bottner’s predecessors experience affect their DNA? Did she inherit the “memories” of the war-time trauma in her very genes?In this moving family memoir, told partly from Melly’s perspective, the author, a physician, recounts the saga of her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. This tale, part history, part scientific reflection on epigenetics, takes the reader on a journey that may read like a novel but is all the more fascinating for being true.
Hannah and Emil
Belinda Castles - 2012
Hannah, a Russian Jew in the West End of London, leaves home for Europe. In Brussels, working for the trade unions, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake.After they make a new life in England, war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is transported to Australia. Determined to find him, Hannah sets off on the dangerous journey across the seas ...
The Lost Spy
Kate Moira Ryan - 2017
27-year-old American detective and heiress, Slim Moran, is hired by a British spymistress to find Marie-Claire, a spy long presumed dead. Slim soon realizes that scores from the last war have not been settled. She races to find out what happened to this deeply troubled lost spy because if Marie-Claire is not dead, she will be soon.
The Baker's Daughter
Sarah McCoy - 2012
As their lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive.In 1945, Elsie Schmidt is a naive teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she is for her first kiss. She and her family have been protected from the worst of the terror and desperation overtaking her country by a high-ranking Nazi who wishes to marry her. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie's doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door would put all she loves in danger. Sixty years later, in El Paso, Texas, Reba Adams is trying to file a feel-good Christmas piece for the local magazine. Reba is perpetually on the run from memories of a turbulent childhood, but she's been in El Paso long enough to get a full-time job and a fiancé, Riki Chavez. Riki, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, finds comfort in strict rules and regulations, whereas Reba feels that lines are often blurred. Reba's latest assignment has brought her to the shop of an elderly baker across town. The interview should take a few hours at most, but the owner of Elsie's German Bakery is no easy subject. Reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again, anxious to find the heart of the story. For Elsie, Reba's questions are a stinging reminder of darker times: her life in Germany during that last bleak year of WWII. And as Elsie, Reba, and Riki's lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive.
When The East Wind Blows: A World War 2 Novel Based on a True Story
Barbara H. Martin - 1998
It brings to life the dramatic experiences of a woman caught between a ruthless government and the will to survive with her children during the last six months of World War 2 in Nazi Germany as she flees the incoming Russian front in the East and right into the carpet bombing in the West. This book brings this war down to a human level in a way that will leave the reader with a stunning new perspective never told in America and represents the missing link in the historical annals of this time. A sequel called WEST WIND is being written at this time and deals with the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich and the survival of Elisabeth, her four children and Helga, the maid. It also describes her husband's experiences in an American prison camp in the south of France. Quote by Elisabeth Wendell, Professor of American Literature, University of Duesseldorf, Germany: “Barbara Martin is a very talented story teller and has captured a dark period of German history during the holocaust with sincere honesty and deep understanding for the people caught up in it. The book makes for great reading enjoyment!”
The Quest for Anna Klein: An Otto Penzler Book
Thomas H. Cook - 2011
The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforth’s life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question. As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world. Danforth is to provide a place where a “brilliant woman” can receive training in firearms and explosives. This is to be the beginning of an international plot carried out by the mysterious Anna Klein—a plot that will ensnare Danforth in more ways than one. When the plan goes wrong and Klein disappears, Danforth’s quest begins: it is a journey of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals that will lead him across a war-torn world in search of answers. Now in his ninety-first year, at the dawn of a troubled new era, he sits in luxury at the Century Club and tells his tale to the young man from Washington he has summoned, for reasons of his own, to hear it.
A Postcard from the Volcano: A Novel of Pre-War Germany
Lucy Beckett - 2009
From the idyllic surroundings of his ancestral home to the streets of cosmopolitan Breslau menaced by the Nazi SS, Hofmannswaldau uncovers the truth about his own identity and confronts the modern ideologies that threaten the annihilation of millions of people.A Postcard from the Volcano opens with the outbreak of World War I and the Prussian pride and patriotism that blind the noble von Hofmannswaldau family to the destruction that lies ahead for their country. The well-researched narrative follows the young count as he leaves home to finish his education and ends up a stranger in the land of his birth.Both intelligent and sensitive, Beckett’s prose explores the complex philosophical and political questions that led Europe into a second world war, while never losing sight of a man whose life is shaped by his times. A deeply moving historical novel that shows the horrific impact that two world wars had on whole countries, and how individuals struggled to deal with the incredible challenges presented by such devastation.
The Traitor
V.S. Alexander - 2020
In the summer of 1942, as war rages across Europe, a series of anonymous leaflets appears around the University of Munich, speaking out against escalating Nazi atrocities. The leaflets are hidden in public places, or mailed to addresses selected at random from the phone book. Natalya Petrovich, a student, knows who is behind the leaflets—a secret group called the White Rose, led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends. As a volunteer nurse on the Russian front, Natalya witnessed the horrors of war first-hand. She willingly enters the White Rose’s circle, where every hushed conversation, every small act of dissent could mean imprisonment or death at the hands of an infuriated Gestapo. Natalya risks everything alongside her friends, hoping the power of words will encourage others to resist. But even among those she trusts most, there is no guarantee of safety—and when danger strikes, she must take an extraordinary gamble in her own personal struggle to survive.
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
David Savill - 2016
After the funeral, Marko flees to England, hoping to put his broken homeland, and the part he played in the loss of his friend, behind him.In 2004, human rights researcher Anya Teal is following a tenuous lead in the hunt for a Bosnian man with blood on his hands. She is also clinging to the fragile hope that she can rebuild a relationship with her first love, William Howell. When Anya invites Will to join her on a Christmas holiday in the Thai beach resort of Khao Lak, she hopes the holiday will offer them the chance to unpick the mistakes of their past. But Khao Lak may also be home to the man Anya is looking for-a man with a much darker history.What nobody knows is that a disaster as destructive as a war is approaching, detonated in the seabed of the Indian Ocean, one that will connect the fates of Marko, William, and Anya, across the years and continents. In its wake, everything Marko thought he knew will be overturned.
The Invisible Bridge
Julie Orringer - 2010
Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour.
Memories of Glass
Melanie Dobson - 2019
As war rips through the heart of Holland, childhood friends Josie van Rees and Eliese Linden partner with a few daring citizens to rescue Eliese’s son and hundreds of other Jewish children who await deportation in a converted theater in Amsterdam. But amid their resistance work, Josie and Eliese’s dangerous secrets could derail their friendship and their entire mission. When the enemy finds these women, only one will escape.Seventy-five years later, Ava Drake begins to suspect that her great-grandfather William Kingston was not the World War II hero he claimed to be. Her work as director of the prestigious Kingston Family Foundation leads her to Landon West’s Ugandan coffee plantation, and Ava and Landon soon discover a connection between their families. As Landon’s great-grandmother shares the broken pieces of her story, Ava must confront the greatest loss in her own life―and powerful members of the Kingston family who will do anything to keep the truth buried.