Book picks similar to
The Long Way Home: The Other Great Escape by John McCallum
non-fiction
autobiography
history
novel
Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America
James P. Duffy - 2010
Lindbergh a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite? Or was he the target of a vicious personal vendetta by President Roosevelt? In Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt, author James Duffy tackles these questions head-on, by examining the conflicting personalities, aspirations, and actions of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles A. Lindbergh. Painting a politically incorrect portrait of both men, Duffy shows how the hostility between these two American giants divided the nation on both domestic and international affairs. From canceling U.S. air mail contracts to intervening in World War II, Lindberg and Roosevelt’s clash of ideas and opinions shaped the nation’s policies here and abroad. Insightful, and engaging, Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt reveals the untold story about two of history’s most controversial men, and how the White House waged a smear campaign against Lindbergh that blighted his reputation forever.
Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story
Irene Butter - 2018
Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene’s father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler’s Germany.By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene tends her ailing parents, cares for starving kids, and even helps bring clothes to her Amsterdam neighbor Anne Frank, before her family is offered a singular chance for freedom…providing the Nazi doctor says they are healthy enough. After two weeks of heart-lifting miracles and heart-breaking tragedies, Irene arrives in the Algerian desert to journey into redemption and womanhood, without her parents or brother.Irene’s first person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times. Irene’s hard-earned lessons are a timeless inspiration.
One Soldier's Story
Bob Dole - 2005
The bravery he showed after suffering near-fatal injuries in the final days of World War II is the stuff of legend. Now, for the first time in his own words, Dole tells the moving story of his harrowing experience on and off the battlefield, and how it changed his life.Speaking here not as a politician but as a wounded G. I., Dole recounts his own odyssey of courage and sacrifice, and also honors the fighting spirit of the countless heroes with whom he served. Heartfelt and inspiring, One Soldier's Story is the World War II chronicle that America has been waiting for.
Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood
Nechama Tec - 1982
Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to pass in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is uniquecelebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.
Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin
Jan Valtin - 1940
. . full of sensational revelations and interspersed with episodes of daring, of desperate conflict, of torture, and of ruthless conspiracy . . . It is, first of all, an autobiography the like of which has seldom been.”The son of a seafaring father, Richard Julius Herman Krebs, a.k.a. Jan Valtin, came of age as a bicycle messenger during a maritime rebellion. His life as an intimate insider account of the dramatic events of 1920’s and 1930s, where he rose both within the ranks of the Communist Party and on the Gestapo hit list. Known for his honesty and incredible memory, Krebs dedicated his life to the Communist Party, rising to a position as head of maritime, organizing worldwide for the Comintern, only to flee the Party and Europe to evade his own comrade’s attempts to kill him. As a professional revolutionary, agitator, spy and would-be assassin, Krebs traveled the globe from Germany to China, India to Sierra Leon, Moscow to the United States where a botched assassination attempt landed him a stint in San Quentin.From his spellbinding account of artful deception to gain release from a Nazi prison and his work as a double-agent within the Gestapo, to his vivid depiction of a Communist Party fraught with intrigue and subterfuge, Krebs gives an unflinching portrayal of the internal machinations of both parties.Writing at age 36 under the name Jan Valtin, Krebs lays bare a young life filled with idealism and devotion—disillusionment and loss—in a world full of revolutionary promise gone immeasurably wrong.”An exciting, real book without a trace of unnecessary melodrama.”—H.G.Wells
Hunting Hitler: New Scientific Evidence That Hitler Escaped Nazi Germany
Jerome R. Corsi - 2014
This announcement has rekindled interest in the claim made by Joseph Stalin, maintained to the end of his life, that Hitler got away. The truth is that no one saw Hitler and Eva Braun die in the bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945. No photographs were taken to document claims Hitler and Evan Braun committed suicide. Hitler’s body was never recovered. No definitive physical evidence exists proving Hitler died in the bunker in Berlin.Dr. Jerome Corsi explores the historical possibility that Hitler escaped Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. FBI and CIA records maintained at the National Archives indicate that the US government took seriously reports at the end of World War II that Hitler had escaped to Argentina. More recent evidence suggests Hitler may have fled to Indonesia, where he married and worked at a hospital in Sumbawa. Even the chief of the US trial counsel at Nuremburg, Thomas J. Dodd, was quoted as saying, �No one for sure can say Adolf Hitler is dead.”Putting massive amounts of evidence and research under a critical eye, Dr. Corsi shows that perhaps modern history’s most tantalizing question has yet to be definitively answered: Did Hitler escaped Nazi Germany at the end of World War II to plot revenge and to plan the rise of the Fourth Reich?
The Pianist: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939–45
Władysław Szpilman - 1946
It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting was resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years inbetween, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. --David Vincent
Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir
Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky - 2010
But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counter-revolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Mochulsky remained a communist party member his entire life--he would later become a diplomat--but was deeply troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. This unprecedented memoir takes readers into that reality and sheds new light on one of the most harrowing tragedies of the 20th century.
Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944
Paddy Ashdown - 2018
In part, he was right. By 1945, his armies were being crushed on all fronts, his regime collapsing with many fleeing retribution for their crimes. Yet, even before the war started, there were Germans very high in Hitler’s command committed to bringing about his death and defeat.Paddy Ashdown tells, for the first time, the story of those at the very top of Hitler’s Germany who tried first to prevent the Second World War and then to deny Hitler victory. Based on newly released files, the repeated attempts of the plotters to warn the Allies about Hitler’s plans are revealed. Key strands to the book’s narrative lie with the actions of Abwehr head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to frustrate Hitler’s policies once the war had started; the plots to kill Hitler and, finally the systematic passage of key German military secrets to London, Washington and Moscow through MI6, the OSS (fore-runner to the CIA) and the “Lucy Ring” Russian spy network based in Switzerland. From 1943 onwards, concerted efforts were made to strike a separate peace with the West to shorten the war and prevent eastern Europe falling under the Soviet yoke.What is revealed is that the anti-Hitler bomb plots, which have received so much attention are, in fact only a small part of a much wider story; one in which those at the highest levels of the German state used every means possible – conspiracy, assassination, espionage – to ensure that, for the sake of the long-term reputation of their country and the survival of liberal and democratic values, Hitler could not be allowed to win the war. It is a matter of record that the European Union we have today and the nature and central position of Germany within it, is, in very large measure, the future envisaged by the plotters and for which they gave their lives.
The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa during the Nuremberg Trials
Christiane Kohl - 2005
In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. In this so-called Witness House, perpetrators and victims confronted each other in a microcosm that reflected the events of the high court. Presiding over the affair was the beautiful Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky (a woman so blond and enticing that she was described as a Jean Harlowe look-alike) who took great pride in her ability to keep the household civil and the communal dinners pleasant. A comedy of manners arose among the guests as the urge to continue battle was checked by a sudden and uncomfortable return to civilized life. The trial atmosphere extends to the small group in the villa. Agitated victims confront and avoid perpetrators and sympathizers, and high-ranking officers in the German armed forces struggle to keep their composure. This highly explosive mixture is seasoned with vivid, often humorous, anecdotes of those who had basked in the glory of the inner circles of power. Christiane Kohl focuses on the guilty, the sympathizers, the undecided, and those who always manage to make themselves fit in. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.
The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945
Guillaume Zeller - 2015
The story of these men is unrecognized, submerged in the overall history of the concentration camps.From all countries and of all ages, the priests were gathered behind the barbed wire of Dachau according to an agreement wrested from the Reich by Vatican diplomacy. For eight years, both tragedies and magnificent gestures punctuated the journey of the clergy at Dachau, from the terrifying forced march of -Holy Week- in 1942 to the heroic voluntary confinement of priests in the barracks of those dying of typhoid, to the moving clandestine ordination of a young German deacon by a French bishop. Never in the course of history have so many priests, monks and seminarians been murdered in such a small area: 1,034 lost their lives.Beyond the personal journeys of which it is composed, the history of the priests at Dachau sheds new light on Hitler's system of concentration camps, on the intrinsic anti-Christian animus of Nazism and, beyond the strictly historical perspective, on faith and spiritual commitment. This book deals with many questions about the priest barracks, including:How does the experience of the priests at Dachau compare to those who were laymen? What were their privileges and what were their particular sufferings? Did the Nazi persecution against the clergy have ideological or political underpinnings? Did the faith and religious commitment of the priests reinforce them against the methodical dehumanization in the camps? Were their moral convictions, forged by the Gospel and the tradition of the Church, able to resist the perversion of values imposed by the SS? Did the sufferings endured by the priests at Dachau bear fruit within the ecclesiastical institution and also outside, at the peripheries of the Church?In Guillaume Zeller's recounting of this strange story, this fragment of the tragedy of the concentration camps allows us to learn answers to these and other intriguing questions.
Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War
Dale Maharidge - 2013
Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign he'd served in it was a single black and white photograph of himself and another soldier tacked to the wall of his basement, where he would grind steel. After Steve Maharidge’s death, his son Dale, now an adult, began a twelve-year quest to understand his father’s preoccupation with the photo. What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why his father had remained silent about his experiences and the man in the picture, Herman Mulligan? In his search for answers, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, with lessons for the children whose parents are returning from war today.
American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger, Forgotten Heroine of Normandy
Bob Welch - 2004
At age seven, she and her family immigrated to America with dreams of a brighter future. But Frances Slanger could not lay her past to rest, and she vowed to help make the world a better place—by joining the military and becoming a nurse. Frances, one of the 350,000 American women in uniform during World War II, was among the first nurses to arrive at Normandy beach in June 1944. She and the other nurses of the 45th Field Hospital would soon experience the hardships of combat from a storm-whipped tent amid the anguish of wounded men and the thud of artillery shells. Months later, a letter that Frances wrote to the Stars and Stripes newspaper won her heartfelt praise from war-weary GIs touched by her tribute to them. But she never got to read the scores of soldiers' letters that poured in. She was killed by German troops the very next day. American Nightingale is the unforgettable, first-ever full-length account of the woman whose brave life stands as a testament to the American spirit.
A Good Enough Daughter: A memoir
Alix Kates Shulman - 1999
From her bestselling novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, to her brilliant memoir, Drinking the Rain, she has chronicled what it means to defy the expectations of family and society in order to map one's own life. Now, in this unflinching but tender memoir, she explores what it means to do what is expected of a daughter--discovering in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. Told with the grace, clarity, and insight we have come to expect from her, A Good Enough Daughter is the story of Shulman's difficult journey from dependency to alienation to reconciliation, as she returns home to care for her aging parents in the last years of their lives. The intersection of her own memory with family documents discovered in her parents' house provides the structure for this riveting exploration of her life as a daughter.
Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany
James Wyllie - 2019
Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Ilse and Gerda... These are the women behind the infamous men—complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself. Until now, they have been treated as minor characters, their significance ignored, as if they were unaware of their husbands' murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labor in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables.James Wyllie's Nazi Wives explores these women in detail for the first time, skillfully interweaving their stories through years of struggle, power, decline and destruction into the post-war twilight of denial and delusion.