My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin


Peter Gay - 1998
    He devised survival strategies—stamp collecting, watching soccer, and the like—that served as screens to block out the increasingly oppressive world around him. Even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.

The Diary of Laura's Twin


Kathy Kacer - 2008
    Laura is to learn about Sara's life and then share her Bat Mitzvah with her -twin- by speaking of her at the ceremony. Sara's diary unfolds with the details of her daily life in the Ghetto, a world full of fear, confusion, tragedy and above all, courage. From Sara's brave story, Laura learns how to find the courage to confront a problem in her own life. Includes photographs, biographies of young heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and true accounts of -Twinning Ceremonies.-

Destiny in the Desert: The Story Behind El Alamein - the Battle That Turned the Tide


Jonathan Dimbleby - 2012
    And yet the true significance of this iconic episode remains unrecognised. In this thrilling historical account, Jonathan Dimbleby describes the political and strategic realities that lay behind the battle, charting the nail-biting months that led to the victory at El Alamein in November 1942. It is a story of high drama, played out both in the war capitals of London, Washington, Berlin, Rome and Moscow, and at the front, in the command posts and foxholes in the desert. "El Alamein" is about politicians and generals, diplomats, civil servants and soldiers. It is about forceful characters and the tensions and rivalries between them. Drawing on official records and the personal insights of those involved at every level, Dimbleby creates a vivid portrait of a struggle which for Churchill marked the turn of the tide - and which for the soldiers on the ground involved fighting and dying in a foreign land.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Incredible True Story of a German-Jewish Teenager's Struggle to Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland


Betty Lauer - 2004
    After dying her hair blonde and studying the catechism in hopes of passing as Christian Poles, Berta, her mother, and her sister live a life of constant vigilance and fear. It is only through her abiding faith in a higher power that she is enabled to survive while hiding in plain sight.

This Is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany 1938-40


William L. Shirer - 2002
    ""This is Berlin"" gathers together two-and-a-half years worth of his daily CBS radio broadcasts that described the menacing steps Germany took toward World War II, just as America and the world heard them. Here is a vivid, compelling, and urgent narrative, one of the great first-hand documents of the Second World War. An introduction by noted historian John Keegan and a preface by Shirer's daughter, Inga Shirer Dean, put Shirer's life and work into context. "It would be almost impossible to overstate the importance of William L. Shirer's broadcasts from Germany . . . Mr. Shirer's descriptions . . . read as well as they were heard 60 years ago." ("Dallas Morning News") "Shirer's broadcasts . . . are models of eloquence and subterfuge . . . any reader will find it hard to put down." ("Publishers Weekly," starred review) "His broadcasts . . . have an enduring freshness." ("Sunday Times")

Love Thine Enemy


Nora Fountain - 1998
     Paris has always been one of her favourite places, but as she walks down the street on her first day and sees a tall stranger with cornflower blue eyes and hair the colour of wheat, she is hit by what the French call un coup de foudre, and her life is changed forever. Maximilian von Engelberg is a German, but despite being proud of Germany, he is against the Nazis, unlike his brother Herman, who is with the SS. He, too, hopes war can be averted, but knows it is a matter of time. He also knows he should stay away from Helen Latimer, but he can’t help himself. Christian Meursault is the Count of Clemenceau, and owns a chateau in Normandy. He has his friends for a weekend, including Helen and Max, and as they play in the pool and eat fabulous food, no one can imagine war. But soon, Hitler invades Poland, and war is inevitable. As Helen’s brother Charles calls her home, Max’s brother Herman insists he return to the Fatherland as well. But when Helen discovers she is pregnant, Max decides they will marry, and escape to Portugal, a country that is neutral. But fate has other plans for them, and Max ends up in Germany. Soon they are both married to other people, as war rages around them. But despite impossible odds, this is not the end of the story for Max, who ends up based in Normandy, and Helen, who starts to work for the French Resistance when her beloved brother Charles is shot down over the English Channel. With so much death, who knows who will survive, and at what cost? Rich in history and filled with the joy of life, Love Thine Enemy is a satisfying read brimming with romance and love during a very dark time. Praise for Nora Fountain ‘Love conquers all in this moving historical romance’ – Holly Kinsella Nora Fountain is a professional novelist and translator. Her short stories have been published in many magazines in the UK and abroad. She writes both contemporary and historical romance, and loves to paint. Nora has served on the committee of the Romantic Novelists Association and is a member of the Society of Authors and the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She lives in Dorset, where she finds Thomas Hardy country and the people who live there, an inspiration.

From Holocaust to Harvard: A Story of Escape, Forgiveness, and Freedom


John Stoessinger - 2014
    His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. “You must have a future,” his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye.As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid—he lived in constant fear that he and his family would be found and killed. However, even in Hitler-ruled Nazi Germany, there were plenty of people who refused to cower to absolute evil and who did everything they could to usher families like Stoessinger’s to freedom.In From Holocaust to Harvard, Stoessinger recalls heartbreaking moments from his childhood and of living a life of secrets in Shanghai. He then presents the second part of his story—the part where he attempts to untangle himself from his previous life and devastating memories and is able to relocate to America, earn a graduate-level degree from a prestigious university, and later become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations despite making a decision that nearly lands him in prison and threatens his hard-earned freedom.Throughout his story, Stoessinger expresses his gratitude to those who helped him through the toughest parts of this life and put him on a path that led him to a Harvard education, a successful career, and inner peace.

Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld


Beate Klarsfeld - 2009
    They met on the Paris Metro and fell in love, and became famous when Beate slapped the face of the West German chancellor--a former Nazi--Kurt Georg Kiesinger.For the past half century, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, prosecuted, and exposed Nazi war criminals all over the world, tracking down the notorious torturer Klaus Barbie in Bolivia and attempting to kidnap the former Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka on the streets of Cologne. They have been sent to prison for their beliefs and have risked their lives protesting anti-Semitism behind the Iron Curtain in South America and in the Middle East. They have been insulted and exalted, assaulted and heralded; they've received honors from presidents and letter bombs from neo-Nazis. They have fought relentlessly not only for the memory of all those who died in the Holocaust but also for modern-day victims of genocide and discrimination across the world. And they have done it all while raising their children and sustaining their marriage.Now, for the first time, in Hunting the Truth, a major memoir written in their alternating voices, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld tell the thrilling story of a lifetime dedicated to combating evil.

Bomber Girls


M.J. Foreman - 2014
    All of its pilots were men. But by 1940, after Fighter Command lost hundreds of pilots during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill realised the recruitment pool needed to be widened. In stepped ATA Senior Commander Pauline Gower, who had been a famous flier before the war. When Gower and ATA founder Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger discussed the idea of women flying in the ATA she answered the question ‘why women?’ with ‘why not?’ These women pilots were to become the ‘Bomber Girls’. By the end of the War, 166 extraordinarily brave young women learned to laugh off morale-crushing socio-political taboos in a bid to help Britain in its hour of need. Among them was the world famous aviatrix and socialite Amy Johnson who, in 1930 had made a pioneering solo flight, from Britain to Australia. But most were ordinary girls, who nonetheless counted themselves the equal of any man, and were willing to face death to defeat the enemy. Unlike the male pilots they had none of the firepower to defend themselves against enemy attack; neither had they been taught any specific manoeuvres that might save their lives if they were shot at. Their orders from the commanders at the ATA ferry pools were simple and straightforward: stay on course, try not to fly above 800 feet in bad weather, and don’t try anything fancy. But their fight was not just against the Nazis. It was also against the male establishment of the Armed Forces. Thanks to the political guile of Miss Gower they were the first collective of women to earn the same salary as their male colleagues doing the same job. Even so, it was only in 2008 that women of the ATA were rewarded with medals for their outstanding work and heroism during the war years. ‘Bomber Girls’ is the inspiring account of the achievements of those 166 women during the Second World War, not only in defending their country, but in breaking new ground for women’s rights. Based on exclusive interviews with the veterans of those harrowing years, it is a brilliantly told story of the War’s heroines. M J Foreman is a journalist, writer and editor with a varied experience in newspapers, broadcasting, and communications. Her books include ‘So You Think You Know Canterbury?’ and ‘Kent Revisited’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich


John Henry Crosby - 2014
    Here he tells of the scorn and ridicule he endured for sounding the alarm when many still viewed Hitler as a positive and inevitable force. He recounts the sorrow of having to leave his home, friends, and family in Germany to conduct his fight against the Nazis from Austria. He tells how he defiantly challenged Nazism in the public square, prompting the German ambassador in Vienna to describe him to Hitler as “the architect of the intellectual resistance." And throughout it all, he conveys his unwavering trust in God, even during his harrowing escape from Vienna and his desperate flight across Europe, with the Nazis always just one step behind.

When We Fall


Carolyn Kirby - 2020
    Mourning her lover, Stefan, who was captured by the Soviets at the start of the war, Ewa is shocked to see him on the street one day.Haunted by a terrible choice he made in captivity, Stefan asks Vee and Ewa to help him expose one of the darkest secrets of the war. But it is not clear where everyone’s loyalties lie until they are tested.Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of VE Day and based on WWII atrocity the Katyn Massacre, When We Fall is a moving story of three lives forever altered by one fatal choice.

You Are Not Forgotten: The Story of a Lost World War II Pilot and a Twenty-First-Century Soldier's Mission to Bring Him Home


Bryan Bender - 2013
    His tour of duty in Iraq, however, left him disillusioned and questioning. Then he accepted a posting to J-PAC, an elite division whose mission is to fulfill the most solemn promise of the military code: bring all fallen soldiers home to the country for which they gave their lives.In 1944 Captain Ryan McCown, a dashing young Marine aviator assigned to the USS Nassau, was shot down over the jungles of Papua, New Guinea. McCown’s diaries and letters home provide a powerful portrait of the fears and sacrifices of a very different war—and the pathos of the ultimate cost of duty.Eyster’s mission with J-PAC eventually took him and his team deep into the sweltering interior of New Guinea to at last deliver this fallen veteran to his loved ones—while perhaps also recovering something lost in himself.

A Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara: Hero of the Holocaust


Alison Leslie Gold - 2000
    This book recounts one of the largest rescues of Jews during the Holocaust.

Colditz: The Full Story


P.R. Reid - 1984
    There were more than 300 escape attempts at Colditz in the four and a half years of its war history and Major Pat Reid vividly describes a unique interlude in Second World War history that contains the mythical qualities which cause a legend to live forever. Men from all over the world and from all walks of life were incarcerated in suffocating intimacy for five years in an alien and hostile land. Under these conditions they proved that men could live together, and that loyalty and generosity could thrive, transcending the natural prejudices of race, creed, language and intellectual diversity.

Motherland: Growing Up With the Holocaust


Rita Goldberg - 2014
    In a deeply moving second-generation Holocaust memoir, Goldberg introduces the extraordinary story of Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—among the Resistance and at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation—that the Guardian newspaper judged “worthy of a film script.”As astonishing as Hilde’s story is, Rita herself emerges as the central, fascinating character in this utterly unique account. Proud of her mother and yet struggling to forge an identity in the shadow of such heroic accomplishments (in a family setting that included close relationships with the iconic Frank family), Rita Goldberg reveals a little-explored aspect of Holocaust survival: the often-wrenching family and interpersonal struggles of the children and grandchildren whose own lives are haunted by historic tragedy.Motherland is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research. It is an epic story of survival, adventure, and new life.