100 Books Like Resistance Women

Based on a true story, this dual timeline book takes us from Eva’s present-day life back to 1942,  when she used her talent for forgery to help hundreds of children escape the Nazis.

Not wanting their true identities to be lost forever, she writes their real names in code in a book. Heart-wrenching at times, this book will ultimately leave you with a smile on your face.

Have you ever read a book that grabbed you with a character challenged by circumstances you’d never considered? Imagine being blind and trying to survive WWII! I was intrigued by this essentially two-person novel set during World War II, which had a ‘cast’ of millions.

Again, the characters! Marie-Laure LaBlanc is a young blind French woman hiding in her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris. I found Doerr’s lyrical sensory descriptions of Marie-Laure’s efforts to make her way around town as she’s pulled into the French resistance thrilling. I loved the depth of characterization when I met the second main character, Werner Pfennig, a radio repair savant, and his journey from a Nazi soldier tracking down illicit resistance radio operators to a young man repulsed by the Nazi brutalization of civilians.

The characters and intrigue pulled me through this book; mixed in with the eventual connection of… show more.

I was immediately hooked by this brilliant novel because of its unusual omniscient narrator, the Grim Reaper. Death, stressed out by the surfeit of “clients” he must deal with during World War II, reveals himself to be a sensitive narrator who sees everything. He especially keeps his eye on a young German girl, her loving foster parents, and the Jewish man they hide and protect.

I fell in love with these characters as they struggled with moral decisions, wartime hardship, danger, and tragedy. Despite the realistic portrayal of German life during WWII, I found this book to be an uplifting read. 

This is my first Lisa Scottoline book.

She’s known for her crime fiction, but this is her first foray into historical fiction and I fell in love with the book. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with art theft but it’s one of the best WW II books I’ve ever read.

I fell in love with her characters and didn’t want the book to end. She has a new book coming out (March 2023) called Loyalty about the rise of the Mafia in Sicily, which is also fascinating and unforgettable.

Did you know that during Hitler’s time in power, unmarried pregnant women who could prove their babies were racially pure were lavishly housed, fed, and supported in something called the Lebensborn program, which then gave their babies to Arayan families? Neither did I!

Coburn researched this little-known part of the Nazi story and creates three complex female characters who all were ensnared in this despicable breeding program. Read it and weep. Or vomit.

Mildred Fish-Harnack was part of a wide circle of anti-Nazis that formed in the 1930s and continued to grow until it was broken by the Gestapo.

Brysac’s portrait of her is detailed and passionate. The fact that Mildred was American but gave up her life for a ‘better’ Germany never fails to move me. Mildred, her husband, and friends passed Nazi military secrets to the Americans and the Russians, and were to pay a heavy price. Virtually all were rounded up and killed.

Mildred, from Milwaukee, was the only American woman to be executed on Hitler’s personal orders. As the Nazis led her to the guillotine, she whispered, "And I loved Germany so much."

Those words act as an epitaph for all the people whose stories we told in our book: they hated the Nazis but loved Germany and wanted to save it from the horror unfolding under Hitler.

Wendy Lower’s powerful examination of the role of German women as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators in the Holocaust exposed the participation of women in the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.

Focusing on individual histories, Lower reveals the backgrounds, actions, and motivations of a cohort of mostly young women who became complicit in mass murder.

Full of haunting descriptions, the image of the wife of a German SS officer leading a group of naked Jewish boys to a woods near her home and shooting them as they wept because she wanted to prove her toughness to the men is only one unforgettable example of women’s participation in the Holocaust.

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.

Historian Mark Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauss in a suburban house near Liverpool. After she passed away, her son shared with him the diaries and letters he found in the attic. In the summer of 1943 Marianne escaped deportation and hid in various places across Germany, supported by a little-known network of unorthodox socialists. Her life under Nazism was horrible—yet strangely liberating. She flourished away from her strict parents but was still traumatized at leaving them behind. The fate of someone who repeatedly changed her German, Jewish, political, and indeed personal identity will move you emotionally as well as stimulate you intellectually. All along, Marianne struggled to maintain control over her own story—which makes A Past in Hiding a brilliant title for an outstanding book.   

Compiled from personal diaries and letters, wartime arts and entertainment, court records, military correspondence, secret police reports and Nazi propaganda ministry assessments, an Oxford professor of modern European history has written this engrossing account of the German military and civilian experience during World War II. Initial enthusiasm for the war effort during the early years of WWII, gradually gives way under the intense bombing of German cities, awareness of the regime’s genocidal activities and military losses on both fronts. In the final year of the war ordinary Germans, realizing the war could not be won, were simply determined to hold on until a just peace can be attained.