Here are 100 books that Forgotten Victims fans have personally recommended if you like
Forgotten Victims.
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I didnât sit down to write Carried Away with a personal sermon in my back pocket. No buried lessons or hidden curriculumâit was just a story I wanted to tell. But stories have a way of outsmarting you.Â
So when I chose these books, I wasnât looking for perfect comparisonsâI was looking for echoes. Some of these books will drag you through POW camps or strand you on a lifeboat with a tiger; others will lean in and whisper that youâve been running a program and calling it personality. A few say the quiet part out loudâabout grit, meaning, and purpose. Others ring you up with fable, abstractions, or science, but they leave their mark just the same.Â
Almost impossible to put downâthis was the first book that made me physically feel the words.
I wouldnât call it enjoyable in the usual sense; the experience was excruciating. But thatâs exactly what makes it unforgettable. Hillenbrandâs prose, paired with the true story of Louis Zamperiniâs plunge from Olympic track star to the unrelenting hell of a POW camp, smacks you off your cozy little couch and right into a world where Sleepytime tea, candles, and Netflix donât exist.
What struck me most was how it captured not only the brutality of survival, but the stubborn, almost irrational resolve of the human spiritâand the possibility of forgiveness that would defy logic. This isnât a book thatâs light to holdâitâs grit, torment, and triumph in equal parts. I recommend it because it inspires without sugarcoatingâharrowing and uplifting in the same breath.
For anyone who wants proof of just how deep theâŚ
From the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit, an unforgettable story of one man's journey into extremity. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood,âŚ
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to runâŚ
Growing up, I felt both the denial and existential shame in the ether of my familyâthat something was missing. Decades after my birth, I learned that many of my ancestors died by the Nazis. Iâm Jewish, but it was never mentioned; my grandfather and father kept it quiet. In fact, we celebrated Christmas. I started to research my lineage at the same time I was writing a story about a catholic boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl when I stumbled upon a reference to a WWII Nazi slave labor death camp called Berga and was stunned to learn that Jewish POWs were enslaved at a death camp.
This book grabbed me and never let go. Humor was infused within the tragic backdrop of Nazi Germany with perfect harmony. I loved the undying loyalty and friendship that was built between jailed teenager, Lev and his Sundance sidekick, Kolya and the eclectic band of characters they bond with while searching for a dozen eggs to use for the colonelâs daughterâs wedding cake.
Hilarious and sad. I laughed out loud many times, then my guts turned inside out from the tragic circumstances plaguing the young men as their life hung in the balance searching for those dozen eggs.Â
From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour and When the Nines Roll Over and co-creator of the HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival - and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.
During the Nazis' brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use inâŚ
Growing up, I felt both the denial and existential shame in the ether of my familyâthat something was missing. Decades after my birth, I learned that many of my ancestors died by the Nazis. Iâm Jewish, but it was never mentioned; my grandfather and father kept it quiet. In fact, we celebrated Christmas. I started to research my lineage at the same time I was writing a story about a catholic boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl when I stumbled upon a reference to a WWII Nazi slave labor death camp called Berga and was stunned to learn that Jewish POWs were enslaved at a death camp.
I marveled at the human spirit expressed so vividly in this book when it became clear it would be impossible to survive when torture and death swirled about as if the prisoners were held in a wind tunnel when all that was left was to steal personal items off fellow fallen prisoners in order to barter and live another day, I prayed for the sun to rise just one more time for Lale and his love, Gita so that they would one day tear their tattered prison garb off and hold onto each other outside the gates of hell.
How sad, yet miraculous, having the job of tattooing the number on the arms of Jewish prisoners helped to ultimately liberate Lale. I burned through this novel at breakneck speed, all the while soaking in the simple yet utterly visceral prose. This book gave me hope that love will outlast hateâŚ
One of the bestselling books of the 21st century with over 6 million copies sold.
Don't miss the conclusion to The Tattooist of Auschwitz Trilogy, Three Sisters. Available now.
I tattooed a number on her arm. She tattooed her name on my heart.
In 1942, Lale Sokolov arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival - scratching numbers into his fellow victims' arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.
Waiting in line to be tattooed, terrified and shaking, was a young girl.âŚ
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother hadâŚ
Growing up, I felt both the denial and existential shame in the ether of my familyâthat something was missing. Decades after my birth, I learned that many of my ancestors died by the Nazis. Iâm Jewish, but it was never mentioned; my grandfather and father kept it quiet. In fact, we celebrated Christmas. I started to research my lineage at the same time I was writing a story about a catholic boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl when I stumbled upon a reference to a WWII Nazi slave labor death camp called Berga and was stunned to learn that Jewish POWs were enslaved at a death camp.
I was forever changed by the sheer poetic authenticity and ferocity of how Primo Levi captured his nearly one year of suffering unbearable atrocities at the Auschwitz Nazi prison camp with such humanity, causing me to gasp for air page after page; I literally had to stop and catch my breath.
As we are in a time of truth denial, as we drift further away from the holocaust, Levi wrenched me back to the horror and reminded me, and all who read his book, to âNever Forget.â I was both entertained and astonished by Leviâs exquisite yet unpretentious prose, captivating me, engaging me, and requiring me to ponder how man can find hope in the midst of evil. My hope for me and all who read this book is that we become a more compassionate species. This book is at the top of my recommended reading list.Â
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearingâŚ
I was born in a log house in Alberta, Canada. I was nineteen months old in August 1939 when my parents decided we should visit my grandmother in Germany and thirteen when we returned. I have been deeply affected by the stories of ordinary families and the trauma they experienced after WWII. To this day, like thousands of others, I feel tremendous inherited discomfort from Nazism and the Holocaust. Our parents' generation did not talk about their wartime experiences, so we must preserve this important part of history and help to relieve the guilt many innocent individuals still harbor while raising awareness of this immensely damaging aspect of war.
I understand the heavy baggage of shame and guilt Barbara Leimsner, as well as many others of German descent who were born during and after the war, felt in their German heritage. As a child, the author accepted her fatherâs Nazi assertions until she learned of the Holocaust in school and rebelled against his beliefs.
This well-written book points out how generations of Germans, not directly touched by the war, feel guilty about the actions taken by earlier generations. It shows how fascist ideology took hold of a nation's young families and serves as a warning for today.Â
How do otherwise decent people become mesmerized by a doctrine of hate? How can its grip be broken? In seeking answers to these pressing questions for our times, Barbara Leimsner confronts the past to discover how one ordinary man-her adored German papa-became thoroughly indoctrinated with Nazi ideology during the Hitler years. Its hateful tentacles reached into her young life as he filled her head with beliefs about Aryan superiority, racist stereotypes, and conspiracy theories.
Leimsner sweeps the reader from immigrant working-class life in 1960s suburban Ontario, back to fascism's rise in her father's former Sudeten homeland and into war. AsâŚ
Iâve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My motherâs 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 Iâm 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.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man sheâŚ
As the only child of Holocaust survivors, I wanted to know everything, and my parents would tell me nothing. "It is to spare you" would be my mother's words of comfort to me. Sadly they were not. Growing up is at best complex; growing up as children of Holocaust survivors is even more so. Some second-generation children could escape the shadow of their parents' suffering; for others, their parents' experiences led them, as I did, into early maturity.
Takeaway Men is a novel that proves once again that you can never forget. Aron and Judy Lubinski and their twin daughters, Bronka and Johanna, leave a Displaced Person Camp in Poland and immigrate to America, hoping to build a new life and escape the horrors of the Holocaust behind them. Through the kindness of Izzy, a cousin that immigrated earlier to America, they settle in Izzy and his wife, Faye's home in Queens, NY. In their neighborhood, we meet other immigrants, survivors, all working hard to build a better life for themselves and their children. Each of the other characters has a different story. They bring another perception of how people try to deal with the experiences of loss, trauma, doubt, and everyday complexities of life. We see this most clearly in the inner thoughts of Aron and Judy. Their struggle is, at times, painful and sorrowful and affectsâŚ
With the cloud of the Holocaust still looming over them, twin sisters Bronka and Johanna Lubinski and their parents arrive in the US from a Displaced Persons Camp. In the years after World War II, they experience the difficulties of adjusting to American culture as well as the burgeoning fear of the Cold War. Years later, the discovery of a former Nazi hiding in their community brings the Holocaust out of the shadows. As the girls get older, they start to wonder about their parents' pasts, and they begin to demand answers. But it soon becomes clear that those memoriesâŚ
I am a professional historian who has been writing books for more than forty years. Most of the books have been about war and dictatorship in the first half of the twentieth century. My last book, The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945, developed my long interest in air war history, which goes back to my first major book written in 1980 on air warfare in World War II.
There is a common assumption among a younger generation brought up on the horrors of the Holocaust or Shoah that the Allies waged war to save the Jews. As Aronson shows in this candid and carefully researched volume, nothing could be further from the truth. The war waged by Hitler against the Jews was well-known, but the Allies did very little to try to end or modify the outcome. For anyone interested in the war, understanding the fate of the Jews in both German and Allied terms is bound up with wider issues of strategy and politics. Aronson tells a slice of the wartime narrative that many might want to forget. It is also a reminder that the war and the Holocaust were bound together, not separate histories. This perspective has not won general acceptance, but it should.Â
This book offers an analysis of the Holocaust as a multiple trap, its origins, and its final stages, in which rescue seemed to be possible. With the Holocaust developing like a sort of a doomsday machine set in motion from all sides, the Jews found themselves between the hammer and various anvils, each of which worked according to the logic created by the Nazis that dictated the behavior of other parties and the relations between them before and during the Holocaust. The interplay between the various parties contributed to the victims' doom first by preventing help and later preventing rescue.âŚ
Sarah Sundinâs love for the stories of World War II comes from family members who served during the war on the US Home Front and abroad. Her passion for research and travel has fueled her award-winning novels. The horrors of the war brought out the worst in humanity. Yet they also brought out the best in humanity, and those storiesâof people who chose kindness and courage and right in trying timesâare the stories that inspire us to choose kindness and courage and right in our own trying times.
This dual timeline novel is expertly researched and woven into a tapestry. In 1940, a German archaeologist is forced to marry an SS officerâand to catalog art stolen from the Jews. In modern times, a young woman with a traumatic past in the neo-Nazi movement works with the Holocaust Museum to fight hate crimes. Their entwining stories show the courage needed to stand up against racismâand the necessity of doing so, no matter the cost.
A young girl, kidnapped on the eve of World War II, changes the lives of a German archaeologist forced into the Nazi Party andâdecades laterâa researcher trying to overcome her own trauma.
1940. Hanna Tillich cherishes her work as an archaeologist for the Third Reich, searching for the Holy Grail and other artifacts to bolster evidence of a master Aryan race. But when she is reassigned to work as a museum curator in Nuremberg, then forced to marry an SS officer and adopt a young girl, Hanna begins to see behind the Nazi facade. A prayer labyrinth becomes a storehouseâŚ
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the worldâs most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the bookâŚ
Professor Elie Wiesel was instrumental in my translating and researching my motherâs journals. My awakening to the dark period in the chapter of the Jewish history happened between 1971-1974 at CCNY, when our paths crossed while I was taking his classes at the department of Jewish studies. It was in his classes that the things that bewildered me as a child growing up in communist Poland in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath started to make sense. I asked my mother to commit to paper the painful memories, she buried deep inside her. She and the next generations have an obligation to bear witness, to be this history's keepers.
The famous Hannah Arendt coined âthe banality of evil." Not monsters, but ordinary people were able to follow Hitlerâs 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. Â
