Book picks similar to
A Fence Away From Freedom by Ellen Levine
history
non-fiction
nonfiction
memoir
The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust
Edith Hahn Beer - 1999
Knowing she would become a hunted woman, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground, scavenging for food and searching each night for a safe place to sleep. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not: With the woman's identity papers in hand, Edith fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. And despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.In vivid, wrenching detail, Edith recalls a life of constant, almost paralyzing fear. She tells of German officials who casually questioned the lineage of her parents; of how, when giving birth to her daughter, she refused all painkillers, afraid that in an altered state of mind she might reveal her past; and of how, after her husband was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia, Edith was bombed out of her house and had to hide in a closet with her daughter while drunken Russians soldiers raped women on the street.Yet despite the risk it posed to her life, Edith Hahn created a remarkable collective record of survival: She saved every set of real and falsified papers, letters she received from her lost love, Pepi, and photographs she managed to take inside labor camps. On exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these hundreds of documents form the fabric of an epic story - complex, troubling, and ultimately triumphant.
Prisoner B-3087
Alan Gratz - 2013
At any cost.10 concentration camps.10 different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly.It's something no one could imagine surviving.But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face.As a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, Yanek is at the mercy of the Nazis who have taken over. Everything he has, and everyone he loves, have been snatched brutally from him. And then Yanek himself is taken prisoner -- his arm tattooed with the words PRISONER B-3087.He is forced from one nightmarish concentration camp to another, as World War II rages all around him. He encounters evil he could have never imagined, but also sees surprising glimpses of hope amid the horror. He just barely escapes death, only to confront it again seconds later.Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will -- and, most of all, his sense of who he really is inside?Based on an astonishing true story.
Becoming A Son
David Labrava - 2015
David writes from life experience as he has lived more lives than most people ever will, and he did it all over the globe. David is an accomplished Glass artist, Tattoo artist, Five Diploma Harley Davidson Motorcycle Mechanic, Producer, Director and an award winning Writer and Actor. David is a member of the most famous and notorious motorcycle club in the world. David was the Technical Advisor on the hit TV series Sons of Anarchy from the inception to the completion of the series. David was also a series regular on the show, reaching that position after being hired as the technical advisor, then becoming a day player actor, then a recurring character then moving to series regular. All of these things had to be earned, as they were not for sale at any price. Becoming A Son is not about them. It’s about David getting to those spots. It’s about overcoming great odds and coming out alive. David left home at fifteen years old and hit the streets. This is David’s journey of discovery and redemption spanning a course of forty years. From the beaches of Hawaii and California, to the forest of the great Northwest, to years in Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York City, Miami then back to California. David hit some highs and survived severe lows, living years on the streets, in and out of jail only to take his life back, and then squeeze every bit out of it that life has to offer. Becoming A Son is a journey of epic proportion. It’s about realizing your dreams and then against the odds achieving them. Adventuring across the globe David learned many lessons by reaching out and trying everything, making many mistakes and paying the price for it and living through it. Now he wrote about it. David has been writing and getting published for over 14 years. He wrote for the Motorcycle magazine ‘The Horse’ then had his own column in the National Hot Rod Magazine ‘Ol Skool Rodz’ for eight years. He co-wrote Episode ten in season four of SOA which Time magazine awarded an honorable mention to as best of the season. David also won the 2013 Readers Choice Buzz focus award for Best Wildcard Actor. Like great authors before him Labrava takes the reader into some dark places most people would never dare to go. Becoming A Son is a modern day story of living on the street and redemption, it is one man’s journey into the darkness of himself crossing the planet and transcending all levels and then coming back again full circle. It is an inspiration for anyone who is chasing their dreams and making them their reality. Becoming A Son will come to be known as an instant classic.
Journey Interrupted: A Family Without a Country in a World at War
Hildegarde Mahoney - 2016
In the spring of 1941, seven-year-old Hildegarde Ercklentz and her family leave their home in New York City and set off for their native Germany, where her father has been recalled to the headquarters of the Commerz & Privat Bank in Berlin. It was meant to be an epic journey, crossing the United States, the Pacific, and Siberia—but when Hitler invades Russia, a week-long stay in Yokohama, Japan becomes six years of quasi-detention, as Hildegarde and her family are stranded in Japan until the war’s end. In this spellbinding memoir, Mahoney recounts her family’s moving saga, from their courage in the face of terrible difficulties—including forced relocation, scarce rations, brutal winters in the Japanese Alps—to their joyous reunion with their German relatives in Hamburg, and their eventual return to New York City in 1950. Richly detailed and remarkably vivid, Journey Interrupted is a story unlike any other—the inspiring tale of an extraordinary family adapting to the hazards of fate, and finding salvation in each other.
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
Menachem Kaiser - 2021
Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as "The Killer." A surprise discovery — that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex — leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance — material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.
For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley - 2003
Until then the war had seemed far away, not something that would touch her or her teenage friends. Now Suzanne's family is kicked out onto the street as German soldiers take over their house as a barracks.Suzanne clings to the one thing she really loves--singing. Her voice is so amazing that she is training to become an opera singer. As Suzanne travels around for rehearsals, costume fittings, or lessons, she learns more about what the Nazis are doing and about the people who are "disappearing." Her travels are noticed by someone else, an organizer of the French Resistance. Soon Suzanne is a secret courier, a spy fighting for France and risking her own life for freedom.
Three Sisters: A True Holocaust Story of Love, Luck, and Survival
Celia Clement - 2020
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
Gitta Sereny - 1995
Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years.Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer's personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler's lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a triumph."Fascinating...Not only a major addition to our knowledge of The Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil."--Newsday"More than a biography...It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler."--San Francisco ChronicleB&W photos.IntroductionPrologueAn Infusion of Stable Stock'I Felt He Was a Human Being'Dizzy with ExcitementA Kind of LoveA Shared Devotion'You've All Gone Completely Insane'A Slight DiscomfortUnleashing MurderA Grey Path IndeedA Moral SoreA Fatal AppointmentAn Irresistable ChallengeA Maelstom of IntriguesA Blinkered CommitmentThe Unbearable Truth'It Was Not Yet My Time'The 20th of JulyScorched Earth'I Stand Unconditionally Behind You'He Is the DreamThe One Interesting PersonA Common ResponsibilitySpandau 1Spandau 2A Twilight of KnowingThe Great LiePostscriptReferencesNotesIndex
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Jeanne Theoharis - 2013
She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.
Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation
Candace Owens - 2020
What do you have to lose? This question, posed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to potential black voters, was mocked and dismissed by the mainstream media. But for Candace Owens and many others, it was a wake-up call. A staunch Democrat for all of her life, she began to question the left’s policies toward black Americans, and investigate the harm they inflict on the community. In Blackout, social media star and conservative commentator Owens addresses the many ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harmful to African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream. Weaving in her personal story that brought her from the projects to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she demonstrates how she overcame her setbacks and challenges despite the cultural expectation that she should embrace a victim mentality. Owens argues that government assistance is a double-edged sword, that the left dismisses the faith so important to the black community, that Democratic permissiveness toward abortion disproportionately affects the black babies, that the #MeToo movement hurts black men, and much more. Well-researched and intelligently argued, Blackout lays bare the myth that all black people should vote Democrat—and shows why turning to the right will leave them happier, more successful, and more self-sufficient.
Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust
Susan D. Bachrach - 1994
Excerpts from 'identity cards' that are part of the Museum's exhibit focus on specific young people whose worlds were turned upside down when they became trapped under Nazi rule. Many of these young people never had the chance to grow up. One and a half million of the victims were children and teenagers--the great majority of them Jewish children but also tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsy) children, disabled children, and Polish Catholic children. Like their parents, they were singled out not for anything they had done, but simply because the Nazis considered them inferior.Those who survived to become adults passed on the stories of relatives and friends who had been killed, with the hope that the terrible crimes of the Holocaust would never be forgotten or repeated. The powerful stories and images in this book are presented with the same hope. Only by learning about the Holocaust will we be able to tell the victims we remember.
Sniper on the Eastern Front: The Memoirs of Sepp Allerberger, Knights Cross
Albrecht Wacker - 2000
Wounded at Voroshilovsk, he experimented with a Russian sniper-rifle while convalescing and so impressed his superiors with his proficiency that he was returned to the front on his regiment’s only sniper specialist.In this sometimes harrowing memoir, Allerberger provides an excellent introduction to the commitment in fieldcraft, discipline and routine required of the sniper, a man apart. There was no place for chivalry on the Russian Front. Away from the film cameras, no prisoner survived long after surrendering. Russian snipers had used the illegal explosive bullet since 1941, and Hitler eventually authorised its issue in 1944. The result was a battlefield of horror.Allerberger was a cold-blooded killer, but few will find a place in their hearts for the soldiers of the Red Army against whom he fought.
Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II
Alvin Kernan - 1994
Kernan served in many battles and was aboard the Hornet when it was sunk by torpedoes in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.“One of the most arresting naval autobiographies yet published.”—Sir John Keegan“An honest story of collective courage, evocative, well-written, and fixed before the colors fade.”—Kirkus Reviews“[Kernan] recounts a wonderful and exciting American story about a poor farm boy from Wyoming who enlisted in the Navy. . . .[He] has written eight other books. I will go back and read them all.”—John Lehman, Air & Space“Details . . . make the moment vivid; that is what it was like, on the Hornet in its last hours.”—Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book Review
Let Me Go
Helga Schneider - 2001
In 1941, in Berlin, Helga Schneider's mother abandoned her along with her father and younger brother. Let Me Go recounts Helga's final meeting with her ailing mother in a Vienna nursing home some sixty years after World War II, in which Helga confronts a nightmare: her mother's lack of repentance about her past as a Nazi SS guard at concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was responsible for untold acts of torture. With spellbinding detail, Schneider recalls their conversation, evoking her own struggle between a daughter's sense of obligation and the inescapable horror of her mother's deeds.
I Love Yous Are for White People
Lac Su - 2009
With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart. Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, I Love Yous Are for White People is memoir at its most affecting, depicting the struggles that countless individuals have faced in their quest to belong and that even more have endured in pursuit of a father's fleeting affection.