I am a member of a generation that wasn’t supposed to be born. My parents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors and I was born amidst the fragments of European Jewry that remained. As a psychotherapist, I have specialized in helping people navigate the multigenerational reverberations of the Holocaust. Having a witness to your own experience, in therapy and through books, provides comfort, understanding, and hope.
What motivated “ordinary people” to risk their lives and their families’ lives to save Jews? I was especially interested to know because my father and his labor battalion of 140 Hungarian Jews were saved by their Commanding Officer. As a therapist, I wondered what personal and family characteristics made a difference. As a mother, I wanted to raise children who care about others and take action in the face of injustice.
Based on interviews with 700 rescuers and survivors, central was the rescuers’ sense of personal obligation to others which began with close family relationships and seeing their parents model caring behavior and ethical values. I remember hearing a rescuer sum it up, “I had to do it to be able to live with myself.”
Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.
When I was six years old, my Dutch relatives visited. Stories swirled about their bravery in getting secrets from the Germans and sharing the intel with the Allies, about their privation during the hunger winter, and their work hiding their Jewish countrymen. I studied abroad in 1977-1978 and took the opportunity to visit my Dutch relatives. They told me more stories of their resistance work, their escapades, and, most importantly, their “why” during my time with them. Such stories don’t leave you–ever. They percolated in my head for years until a voice came to me, Rika’s voice, and I began to write. Sixty Blades of Grass is the result.
This is the Dutch Underground at its finest. The “why” people would risk their lives and resist the German persecution of the Jews came through loud and clear here.
Based on a true story, Corrie Ten Boom ran an underground cell out of her home in Harlem with the support of her family. Her religion sustained her through tremendous losses and suffering but enabled her to find peace for herself and others post-war.
It's World War II. Darkness has fallen over Europe as the Nazis spread hatred, fear and war across the globe. But on a quiet city corner in the Netherlands, one woman fights against the darkness.
In her quiet watchmaking shop, she and her family risk their lives to hide Jews, and others hunted by the Nazis, in a secret room, a "hiding place" that they built in the old building.
One day, however, Corrie and her family are betrayed. They're captured and sent to the notorious Nazi concentration camps to die. Yet even…
I was 12 years old when, in Amsterdam on a family holiday, I was taken to see the Anne Frank House. Until then I knew very little about WW2, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. After viewing the ‘secret annexe’ my father bought me The Diary of Anne Frank, which was on sale there, and I started reading it in the car as we drove off. The book sparked my deep lifelong interest in that chapter of history. Many years later I discovered that my own mother also had an extraordinary wartime story. By then I was a journalist and knew I’d have to write a book about it—Deadly Carousel.
This autobiography showed me that a tale of survival against the odds, in the most dangerous of times, can also be highly entertaining. To avoid deportation to the death camps, Jewish teenager Lothar Orbach assumes a fake Aryan identity and launches into a precarious underground existence in the heart of the Nazi empire, living off his wits, dodging the authorities and mixing with various shady characters. In my favourite episode, he and his hustler pal Tad meet two sex-starved teenage sisters, the daughters of a prominent Nazi family living in the elegant house of a deported Jewish professor. As the parents are away, Lothar and Tad move in and fulfil the girls’ lusty desires in return for homecooked meals…until the day they stuff two suitcases with food, clothes, alcohol and jewellery, and scarper back underground. Marvellous.
Now in book form, this is the intensely moving first-person account of "the Auschwitz Memoirist's extraordinary manuscript" described in Philip Roth's Patrimony: A True Story.
This is the true story of a young man born at the wrong time in the wrong place. Lothar Orbach's family proudly traces its German heritage back to the fifteenth century, but that is no help to a Jewish boy coming of age in Hitler's Berlin.
At the center of this world gone mad is Lothar, outwardly a cagey, amoral street thug, inwardly a sensitive, romantic youth, devoted son, and increasingly religious Jew, clinging to…
The books I recommend have stayed with me years after I read them. I’ve always been fascinated by my Jewish heritage and the rich traditions of my forebearers. I’ve incorporated some of that heritage in my own work as an author. Most recently, I published a historical novel about the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, which took me down a rabbit hole of research into Jewish literature. I revisited books I’d loved for decades and discovered new books I loved.
Singer, one of the great names in Jewish literature, takes his readers to turn of the century Eastern Europe and enfolds them in the hierarchy of Jewish society. He masterfully captures a way of life that flourished before the Second World War.
I was so engrossed in this powerful story I immediately began reading Singer’s other works.
The vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality. The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.
In writingThe Lost Son, which is loosely based on family history, I immersed myself in the history of World War II and in the world between the wars. It was important to me to understand this period from both sides—from the perspective of Germans who were either forced to flee their homeland or witness its destruction from within by a madman, and from the perspective of Americans with German ties who also fought fascism. The stories of ordinary people during this time are far more nuanced than the epic battles that World War II depicted, as the stories of ordinary people often are.
Sons and Soldierstells the stories of the Ritchie Boys, a special military intelligence unit of the US Army in World War II trained in Camp Ritchie, Maryland and made up of German-Austrian men, often German Jews who had fled Nazi persecution. These men had everything to lose: if they were captured and identified behind enemy lines, they would be killed on the spot. However, they also knew that their special knowledge of the German language and German culture gave them an advantage against Hitler’s army. The Ritchie Boys were critical to the Allied victory. Not surprisingly, those who survived went on to become leaders in American society, great heroes who understood that there are some things worth dying for.
'The last great, untold story of WWII... highly compelling' Daily Mail
Fleeing Nazi persecution for America in the 1930s, the young German-born Jews who would come to be known as The Ritchie Boys were labelled 'enemy aliens' when war broke out. Although of the age to be inducted into the U.S. military, their German accents made them distrusted. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had in their ranks, and sent these young recruits to a secret military intelligence training centre at Camp Ritchie, Maryland.
I’m always excited when I start a good book that turns out to be a great book. The writing in this book is so beautiful that there are passages I still recall months later.
Kiernan dives into a specific time and place in history, one month after the end of WW2 in France, and explores the challenges of redemption, forgiveness, and peace through the experience of one man. The vivid descriptions of the landscape, glass making, and the unlikely inhabitants of the chateau painted indelible images in my mind. I savored this novel slowly because I did not want to miss one delicious sentence.
From the critically acclaimed author of Universe of Two and The Baker’s Secret, a novel of hope, healing, and the redemptive power of art, set against the turmoil of post-World War II France and inspired by the life of Marc Chagall.
One month after the end of World War II, amid the jubilation in the streets of France, there are throngs of people stunned by the recovery work ahead. Every bridge, road, and rail line, every church and school and hospital, has been destroyed. Disparate factions—from Communists, to Resistance fighters, to federalists, to those who supported appeasement of the Nazis—must…
Reseda, California plays an important part in my novels. I grew up there in a middle-class Jewish family, and we experienced the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. My parents got divorced, and my brother and I were raised by our working mom until she became paralyzed by a stroke. I found refuge in writing. I wrote The Remainders in 2016 during a tumultuous time when issues of family conflict, homelessness, and the growing cruelty of society came into focus. Still, I believe decency and compassion will prevail. The books I write and enjoy reading seek to find light in the darkest of circumstances.
I read this powerful graphic novel series when the first collections came out in the 1980s.
It shows the horrors of the Holocaust and the impact it has on the families of the survivors. Maus is best known for depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, but Art’s troubled relationship with his father Vladik and the death of his mother Anja by suicide frame the story.
Maus is my favorite graphic novel series and a must-read for understanding the Holocaust and how it shaped Jewish life since.
The bestselling first installment of the graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker) • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My mother’s family were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Belarus, and as a child I was often asking questions about what their world was like before it was destroyed. I later studied at Brandeis University where I earned my doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and then taught Jewish Literature at the University of Toronto. When my novel Come Back for Me was published, it felt as though many of my lifelong passions had finally come together in one book. Yet I’m still asking questions. My second novel (almost completed!) continues my quest to further my knowledge of all that was lost.
This is the kind of novel that stays with you long after you finish reading it.
It shows how some individuals can survive even the worst circumstances if they possess tenacity, hope, and perhaps most importantly, the determination to work together as a group.
To the Edge of Sorrow is the story of a disparate group of Jewish partisans during World War Two who use whatever skills they possess to survive Nazi tyranny. This not only involves foraging for food or constructing temporary shelter. Some also devote themselves to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, despite their degraded circumstances.
I found it particularly inspiring to read about the strength and endurance of the Jewish spirit despite the attempt by the Nazi regime to obliterate the entirety of Jewish life in Europe.
In Villa Air-Bel, I wrote about an extraordinary man, Varian Fry. A journalist sent to France in 1940 with a list of 200 artists to save, he expected to stay 2 weeks. He stayed 15 months, establishing the Emergency Rescue Committee. By the time the Vichy police expelled him, he’d saved 2,000 people. Who has the courage to put their lives on the line for strangers? In The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation, I recorded how five people risked their lives to hide the Frank family until they were finally betrayed. Two of the helpers were sent to concentration camps. It takes courage to resist Fascism. Would I/ we have that courage?
Bart van Es tells the true story of how his grandparents were one of several families in the Netherlands who hid a young Jewish girl named Lientje during World War II.
It was extremely dangerous to do so. If found out, the Dutch family hiding her would have been arrested and sent off to one of the Nazi concentration camps. Van Es conveys a full sense of the tragedy involved when the girl’s parents give their beloved daughter to their friends as the only way to save her.
What’s unusual about this book is that Van Es tells two stories: his own journey as he tracks down Lientje in Amsterdam and her story of the terrible things she went through in hiding. Dutch “Jew hunting units” roamed the streets. Holland deported over 70% of their Jewish population to the Eastern camps.
"The hidden gem of the year . . . Sensational and gripping, and shedding light on some of the most urgent issues of our time, this was our unanimous winner." -Judges of the 2018 Costa Award
The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland during World War II, who hides from the Nazis in the homes of an underground network of foster families, one of them the author's grandparents
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It…
I’m passionate about this topic because my own great-grandmother escaped a war, the Mexican Revolution of 1913, at the age of nine years old. Family stories described her journey of marching across the desert, almost dying, determined to reach the United States. I am also an immigrant myself and I enjoy relating to stories that depict the immigrant experience.
I enjoyed reading about the courage the young protagonist, Annemarie, had and her determination to keep her best friend safe.
Lowry’s lyrical words put you in the moment and make you feel part of that world. I learned a lot about what WWII looked outside Germany, how people reacted to it, and how many outwitted the enemy.
A powerful story set in Nazi occupied Denmark in 1943. Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen is called upon for a selfless act of bravery to help save her best-friend, Ellen - a Jew.
It is 1943 and for ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen life is still fun - school, family, sharing fairy stories with her little sister. But there are dangers and worries too - the Nazis have occupied Copenhagen and there are food shortages, curfews and the constant threat of being stopped by soldiers. And for Annemarie the dangers become even greater... her best-friend Ellen is a Jew. When Ellen's parents are taken…
