Book picks similar to
Witness to the Holocaust by Michael Berenbaum


holocaust
memoir-and-biography
true-crime
biographies-and-memoirs

Prey: My Fight to Survive the Halifax Grooming Gang


Cassie Pike - 2019
    She fell through the net of the care system and reached out for friendship, only to be consumed by an escalating spiral of abuse. This harrowing and truly shocking story captures in vivid detail how gangs of men were able to ply a child with drink and drugs, then rape her and pass her around their associates with no one seemingly able to step in and prevent it. Cassie was lost in a world of appalling degradation for years before a local policeman and caring social worker became instrumental in helping her to escape and rebuild her life. In 2016, the largest case of child sexual exploitation ever brought to trial at that time in the UK resulted in the conviction of 17 men. Since Cassie's abusers were jailed, child safeguarding policies have improved so that vulnerable children like Cassie should never again fall through the net and become prey.

Displaced: A Memoir


Esther Wiebe - 2020
    In the span of her early childhoodthrough adulthood, Esther takes you on a journey of unspeakable losses, survival,resilience and strong family bonds.For Esther, the youngest of fourteen siblings born into a conservative Mennonite Colony in the heart of South America, everyday life revolves around rules, routine and monotonous chores on a family farm without so much as electricity and running water. As she sees it, her childhood is normal and ordinary. That is until one catastrophic day when everything changes. Suddenly, eleven-year-old Esther must leave behind everything she’s ever known.This is the true, heartbreaking account of growing up in a Mennonite family and theharrowing events that eventually lead to her and her three youngest siblings’ dramatic escape to Canada. Everything Esther has ever known about her identity is left behind as she struggles to find a place for herself in a new country, a new culture, and a new language.

Hope Is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age Under Nazi Terror : A Classic of Holocaust Literature


Halina Birenbaum - 1967
    Covering the years 1939-1945, it is the author's own account of her experience growing up in the Warsaw ghetto and her eventual deportation to, imprisonment in, and survival of the Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Neustadt-Glewe camps. The book is notable for its simplicity and clarity of style, and is told with a first-person immediacy that makes the stark terror of its content stand out. This edition is expanded with a new epilogue and postscripts that bring Mrs. Birenbaum's story up to date.

Auschwitz


Laurence Rees - 2005
    Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail—from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred.Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews—their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz

Cold Fury: The Cannock Chase Murders


David J. Cooper - 2020
    Why would a man, married to an attractive young woman, want to sexually assault and murder innocent little girls?In the late 1960s, Cannock Chase in Staffordshire became the centre of the biggest murder hunt in Britain.The bodies of five year old Diane Tift, six year old Margaret Reynolds, and seven year old Christine Darby were found dumped there.The killer thought he was cleverer than the police and slipped through the net four times.He would have continued with the killings but he made a big mistake.Find out what happened and how the police eventually caught up with him.

The Bleeding Sky


Louis Brandsdorfer - 2009
    Growing up Jewish in a small Polish town near the German border, my mother and one sister were all that survived from among her parents, 4 sisters, 2 brothers, husband and young daughter. Persecuted and hunted by the Germans. Hiding with friendly Poles. Imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, labor camps and Auschwitz. This is the story of how many of them died and how my mother struggled to survive.

Murder in Mayberry: Greed, Death, and Mayhem in a Small Town


Jack & Mary Branson - 2008
    Throw in lies, gossip, greed, international extradition struggles, and a conflicted federal agent, and the result is Murder in Mayberry. Lifting the veil on a picket-fenced, Bible Belt town, this chilling drama reveals a tale of secret lives and drug addiction, and is both an involving true crime story and the story of the author’s emotional journey from normal life to life turned upside down.

Roses in a Forbidden Garden; A Holocaust Love Story


Elise Garibaldi - 2016
      This story is the true account of Inge Katz; the striking daughter of a successful businessman who meets and falls in love with a handsome fellow inmate. But when he gets shipped “Out East” to a Death Camp, she goes years not knowing if he is alive or dead. Her love for this man endures against all odds – from Nazi rifles, to starvation, to disease, to assaults of allied fire.   But as time passes without word or confirmation of his survival, should she remain loyal, or, as everyone suggests, move on with another?

Nightmare in Napa: The Wine Country Murders (48 Hours Mystery)


Paul LaRosa - 2007
    A third roommate heard the horrific commotion but never saw the killer. News of the tragedy sent shockwaves throughout the peaceful region as well as the nation -- but while investigators pursued every angle from a satanic cult to a disgruntled suitor, the murders of Leslie Mazzara and Adriane Insogna remained unsolved. Until someone came forward with a shocking confession -- someone who was close enough to the women to escape suspicion. Someone who knew the victims all too well.Complete with up-to-the-minute court action and the stunning crime scene breakthroughs that turned the case around, here is the full story of the Nightmare In Napa.

We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust


Jacob Boas - 1995
    Diary entries written by five Holocaust victims document the ordeals suffered in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, and Holland.

The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder


Rachel Howard - 2005
     On the night of June 22, 1986, ten-year-old Rachel Howard woke to a disturbing sight: pools of blood on the hallway carpet and a glimpse of her father clutching his stabbed throat. Stan Howard died minutes later, and his bizarre small-town murder was never solved. Rachel’s father was thirty-two, a laid-back, handsome man who loved the music of Rod Stewart and had no known enemies. Faced with her family’s shock, Rachel decided she would cope the only way she knew how: By keeping silent and trying to pretend the murder had never happened. Now, seventeen years later and recently engaged, Rachel attempts to uncover for herself what happened that night. Finally reconnecting with her father’s family, she sorts through her relatives’ memories of his death and presses the less-than-helpful detectives. Still bewildered, she seeks the only other two people present at the murder: her former stepmother and stepbrother, neither of whom she has seen since her father’s funeral. The result is a tender portrait of a father and a keen investigation of memory, truth, and how a family moves on from a tragedy for which they may never find answers. “Homicide has lifelong effects for its secondary victims, and educating people to that fact is an essential part of the battle for victims’ rights. The genres of True Crime and Memoir both need more books like The Lost Night. Rachel’s memoir is important and enlightening. She is very brave for taking on the telling of this story. --Jeanine Cummins, author of A Rip in Heaven "From the first page to the last, I read Rachel Howard's spellbinding memoir of murder and its harrowing aftermath with my heart in my mouth. A riveting exploration of grief, suspicion, and the tangled ties that make up the modern family, her need to uncover the identity of the person responsible for the vicious stabbing death of her beloved, but flawed father compels her on a brave, emotional quest for the truth. I turned the pages late into the night, eager to follow Howard as she pursued the next clue and the next, as well as to discover how she would come to terms with her terrible loss. A clear-sighted writer, willing to admit to the gaps in fact and memory that will always remain, the true triumph of her story is the hard-won, if uneasy truce she ultimately establishes with the past." --Anna Cypra Oliver, author of Assembling My Father: A Daughter's Detective Story

Innocent: A murdered son. A grieving mother. The fight to clear her name.


Sarah Rose - 2015
    I couldn’t speak to any of my family. It was like I’d been found guilty before I could be proved innocent’Losing a child is any mother’s worst nightmare, but how do you grieve when you’re being blamed for his death? When Sarah Rose discovered her 15-month-old son Kamran had been brutally murdered, she was immediately put under arrest. The days she spent in jail were terrifying and harrowing, but it was when she heard the results of the post-mortem that the truth hit her: her boyfriend, Nicholas, the man she’s loved and trusted, had beaten her little boy to death. Heartbroken, isolated and alone, she knew she’d have to fight to prove her innocence and put Nicholas behind bars.Tragic, moving, yet ultimately uplifting, this is story of a mother’s love and her battle for the truth.

Murder Is A Family Affair


Donalie Beltran - 2013
    More than one.Some stories just have to be told and so it is with the Tuxhorn family. Murder Is A Family Affair follows August Tuxhorn to America in the mid 1850s where Charles was born in Illinois. The boy grew up with a beautiful face and a stone heart. Evil set in motion by his grandfather and then his father, Charles carries on the family’s violent temper and disregard for human life. Did he inherit these traits shared by others? More important, did he pass them on? Follow their lives and watch the carnage they leave behind. The lives lost or destroyed in their wake.Has the evil in this family been buried with them?Or is it just the beginning?

Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family


Miep Gies - 1987
    The reminiscences of Miep Gies, the woman who hid the Frank family in Amsterdam during the Second World War, presents a vivid story of life under Nazi occupation.

Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany


Marthe Cohn - 2002
    Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe’s sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. The rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army.As a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army, Marthe fought valiantly to retrieve needed inside information about Nazi troop movements by slipping behind enemy lines, utilizing her perfect German accent and blond hair to pose as a young German nurse who was desperately trying to obtain word of a fictional fiancé. By traveling throughout the countryside and approaching troops sympathetic to her plight, risking death every time she did so, she learned where they were going next and was able to alert Allied commanders.When, at the age of eighty, Marthe Cohn was awarded France’s highest military honor, the Médaille Militaire, not even her children knew to what extent this modest woman had faced death daily while helping defeat the Nazi empire. At its heart, this remarkable memoir is the tale of an ordinary human being who, under extraordinary circumstances, became the hero her country needed her to be.