100 Books Like Babi Yar

When I was secretly working as an escort, living and working ‘underground’, and came upon this book, I was immediately drawn in because here, too, despite and thankfully many different circumstances, was a woman witnessing and taking notes not only to keep herself sane but also to bear witness to the real events as they affected women in this terrible and extraordinary moment in history.

Instead of events and general washes of the main players, as is so often what we get when studying a period of history, here was a true, authentic voice of the actual effects and aftermath of the war on the people living through it. And she wrote it as it was being lived! …” with nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity…”

As the author, she chose to remain anonymous to protect herself. This choice resonated with me until… show more.

I took up this gigantic novel on the recommendation of a friend who recommended Grey Bees. I was skeptical that I would read much of it because it is about Russia during the Second World War. However, once I got into the book, I was blown away.

Grossman is a bigger artist with words than any painter. He had a deep insight into humanity, every aspect of it. The chapters are short, but the book is over 800 pages long. I wanted to stop, but each chapter presented such insights that it was impossible not to be in awe at his writing. The story includes descriptions of the battle of Stalingrad from both sides, family life, the plight of Jews, and much, much more. 

After reading this book, I feel that I have lived another lifetime. There is a lot of sadness, some comedy, and lots of horror and… show more.

This remarkable book shows how it is possible to encapsulate the history of the mass murder of the Jews in the former Soviet Union in a single object, in this case, a photograph that documents the horrific final moments in the life of a Jewish family, one of the nearly 1.5 million Jews shot by the Germans and their collaborators after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Wendy Lower was able to locate the killing site and find the identities of the mother and her children and of the killers. I was deeply moved by the way it enables one to put a human face on the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust, and, in particular, the women and children who constituted an important part of the victims.

In deeply personal terms, Father Desbois describes how his curiosity about his grandfather’s incarceration in Ukraine led him to study the atrocities committed there against the Jews. The book is written in an almost conversational style, creating a sense of intimacy between Father Desbois and the reader. Desbois is able to persuade those who witnessed atrocities to open up and confess what they have seen and what they remember. Together with a team of ballistic experts, interpreters, historians, and archaeologists, he identified numerous sites of mass graves. Desbois, who popularized the term “The Holocaust by Bullets,” has been instrumental in expanding our understanding of the Holocaust beyond the death camps and the ghettos to the more intimate killings that took place in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

I love this book because it’s a collection of mini-biographies of contemporary writers, musicians, and artists from the 20th century, some I’d heard of and some I hadn’t, but they’re all weird.

Like, as I’m writing this, I just flipped to a random page and there’s a section on Michael Mann, who once owned the apartment I’m writing this in. And then I flip a little more and get five succinct and totally bizarre pages about Mao.

I love how random his book is!

The famous Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil." Not monsters, but ordinary people were able to follow Hitler’s murderess ideology. Ordinary Men clearly shows how men and women from all walks of life were capable of becoming cold-blooded killers. Ordinary Men were the Nazi mobile gas units and death squads responsible for the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Poland & Ukraine.   

Plokhy is a renowned Ukrainian-American historian who makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. His partisan, pro-Ukraine narrative of the war and its origins is vigorous and informative.

Of particular value is his highly illuminating account of the triangular relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in the run-up to the war.

I wrote my books to reveal how a government’s lies about the present and past corrupts not only public life, but reaches deep into the psyches of individuals.

The correspondence between the physicist Heisenberg, working in secret on the atomic bomb (notoriously unsuccessfully), and his wife safe in Bavaria provides an intimate glimpse of how deeply the Nazi regime penetrated family life and challenged the natural love of one’s homeland.

Heisenberg and his wife were very much in love, devoted to each other and their children. They had a true and equal partnership. Readers can enjoy the sweet irony of knowing how the war turned out, something the participants could not know.

Instead, they were occupied with worries about food, money, the children’s health, sadly aware that things could never go back to how they were.   

This book provided an insight into WWII in Italy. It is captivating and informative.

It tells the story of Pino, a brave 17-year-old who not only spied on the Germans who occupied his homeland but also crossed the Alps many times to save Jewish people. Full of mystery and intrigue, it was hard to put down until the end.

Choosing a Ken Follett book is difficult–there are so many.

Eye of the Needle, a spy thriller, was the book that put Follett at the forefront of thriller writers, and I normally go for books where the main character is a man, but, in this case, I’ve chosen this book. This one is about a gang of disparate women (the Jackdaws) sent to blow up a telephone exchange in France just before D-Day. Flick is the young British secret agent tasked with assembling the team before parachuting into France. 

I always aim to write perfectly feasible stories because life is too unpredictable to end with everyone living ‘happily ever after.’ Ken Follett also knows this, which is why this book is not only filled with deep secrets but also ends with tragedy – but I don’t want to spoil it for you!