100 Books Like The Untold Story of Eva Braun

How Parisians survived Nazi Occupation—to what extent they resisted or collaborated—has been debated for decades but Sebba looks through a new lens: What did Parisiennes, specifically, do during these years? She was just in time to interview some key women who, having survived concentration camps, went on to live defiantly long lives. Others wouldn’t speak, still traumatised by their experiences. But Sebba has plenty to work with, and the pace at which she pulls it all together propels this book’s sense of importance. One can’t help but feel relieved that these stories have now been told. Some of it is shameful, sure, but you ultimately remember the tales of until-now-unsung heroines, whose fierce love for their city, above even their own welfare, makes them well deserving of a place in Paris history.

I wanted to dive into Hitler’s mind as I wrote words pouring from his mouth, and this book did not disappoint. From the opening pages I felt immersed in his pathetically creepy world where he was always the hero, or the wronged one, the victim. His rise to power was foreseeable, predictable, and avoidable, urged forward by people of wealth who consistently chose personal profit over integrity. Reading this book helped me understand how divisiveness can be propagated using deft propaganda. This book is terrifying, revealing, and really important to understand.

This unlikely story has a different focus from other Holocaust memoirs. After working in a slave labour camp, Edith Hahn, a Viennese Jew, was ordered to report for transport east, and probable death, but instead went into hiding with a new identity thanks to two Christian friends. Jews hiding in plain sight were called U-boats. Though trained as a lawyer, she worked as an ignorant nurse’s aide in a hospital and met a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. She told him she was Jewish but he wanted to marry her anyway and became both a protector and a constant threat. In an unsentimental style and with surprising dark humour, Hahn has written a gripping account of that period when being found out would have been fatal.

There are several books I could recommend written by adults who were imprisoned as children in Terezin during the war, but this one stands out because of its artwork interspersed with factual accounts of daily life. Indeed, it’s the factual perspective she takes in her descriptions that makes them so heart-wrenching. Her map was my primary tool in writing descriptions of the camp, and her artwork, imitating her writing style, comes across as stark and factual. Written as a diary, not a novel, I cried at the cruelty with which her life unfurled before her. At the same time, however, she manages to capture the beauty of being a child, full of hope and promise. That balance makes the book a jewel.

Berlin, 1945. As Russian forces close in around Hitler’s bunker, shots ring out underground. Rather than face the avenging Russians, the Fuhrer, along with his wife, Eva Braun, commits suicide. Yet as fanatical Nazis salute the burning bodies in the Reich Chancellery garden, the real Adolf Hitler is crawling through the bunker’s air ducting…

And so begins Joseph Heywood’s superb military thriller, a book I read in less than two days and one that paints a realistic, chaotic picture of the last days of the thousand-year Reich. As Herr Wolf is hunted across war-torn Europe by a team of Soviet special operations soldiers, it is the Fuhrer himself who threatens to be the architect of his own downfall. So good, I may have to read this one again.

This book is delightful. Shapiro is one of my favorite food historians. I recommend all her books, but if you’ve never read her before, start here.

It’s full of surprising and unexpected stories. Eleanor Roosevelt extracts culinary revenge, Eva Braun drinks champagne while worrying about her weight, and Helen Gurley Brown binges on sugar-free gelatin. These stories left me thinking about my own relationship with food and what that says about the society we live in. 

As the Russian Empire collapsed and descended into civil war between 1918 and 1922, peasants, townspeople, and soldiers murdered over 100,000 Jewish residents in the Ukrainian lands. Jeffrey Veidlinger’s well-written, deeply researched account of this violence helped me understand what happens when empires disintegrate, and ordinary people are caught up in as well as participate in violence over contested territories.

For me, Veidlinger’s main achievement in this book is twofold: first, exploring the complex, horrific reasons why so many imperial peoples engaged in violence, and second, how the murders “explain how the next wave of anti-Jewish violence became possible.”

Some events are burned into the collective psyche. In 1984 in India, the world’s largest democracy, over 8,000 people were murdered in a four-day genocidal massacre, orchestrated by the government. This book is written in a measured tone, evidenced, and filled with witness accounts. The background is explained, the events are charted, and those who gave help and shelter are included. Over the decades, few of the guilty have been brought to account. The book becomes a drumbeat for justice. 

I adored this memoir because it is the perfect combination of poignant and hilarious. Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb’s beloved grandmother Bobby has died, but on these pages and in the voicemails Kalb saved, she not only comes alive but also shines.

Though it’s clear that Kalb desperately misses this woman who served as a guiding light and her biggest cheerleader, the memoir reads like a celebration of life where humor and wisdom will make you smile rather than weep. After reading this memoir, I gave it to friends who’d lost and missed their parents and grandparents.

Fromm, too, was a journalist alarmed by the rise of Nazism and Germans’ increasing embrace of hatred and falsehood. She differs from Halton and Shirer in that she was 1) born in Germany, and thus had a deeper perspective on Nazism’s place in German history and culture, 2) a woman, and thus expected to report on “society” and fashion stories, although her interests and abilities soon drew her to politics, and 3) Jewish, and therefore subjected to the daily indignities, threats, and violence that in 1938 led her to flee a land her family had inhabited for five centuries. Fromm seemed to know everybody, including Nazi bigwigs, and was continually astounded by the degrees to which foreign visitors fell for blatant Nazi propaganda. Mackenzie King should have been listening.