Books like To the Tashkent Station — picked by fans

This book restored the stories of the Soviet women who served in the Second World War (Great Patriotic War in Russian history), which had been ignored in the official histories.

Hundreds of veteran and witness testimonies (the book was first published in the 1980s) build a powerful, if sometimes painful, picture of pilots, snipers, and tank drivers as well as medics on the frontline, and their postwar lives.

This is essentially an oral history giving voice to hundreds of women first drafted, then ignored. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.

No book has given me a clearer, more visceral sense of what it was like to be in the Red Army than this book. It reminds me of my favorite war story—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—Schechter dives into the objects (spoons, weapons, letters, trinkets, tools) that Red Army soldiers carried to give you a sense of their gritty, everyday reality—how they ate, slept, fought, joked, and what it felt like to be in their bodies as they moved through the killing fields of eastern Europe. 

Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) endured one of history’s great sieges when Hitler’s armies surrounded it in 1941. By the time the Red Army liberated it in 1944, the city’s thriving population of 2.5 million had been reduced by evacuations, bloodshed, and starvation. Salisbury brings to life the harrowing experiences of ordinary men and women who managed to survive with their dignity and devotion to civilization intact. The book casts an ironic shadow forward to the ordeal of Ukraine’s city dwellers today. And if you want to understand Vladimir Putin—whose childhood was shaped by family traumas in wartime Leningrad—this is a good place to start.

Why are soldiers willing to fight and die, often despite horrific odds, for a cause?  And why do whole armies fall apart under less difficult conditions? The Red Army, which lost millions of men and suffered massive encirclements by the Wehrmacht provides the perfect case study of these questions. After months of retreat, the Red Army turned the tide at Stalingrad and drove the Nazis back to Berlin. 

Reese’s careful research and balanced conclusions note that morale and motivation fluctuated depending on soldiers’ nationality, social group, and personal circumstances. Many were deeply motivated by Soviet patriotism, which was sometimes, but not always coincident, with socialist ideals and support for Stalin. The army quickly proved that despite catastrophic losses of people and equipment, it could regroup and deliver victory. Its successes were tied in no small measure to the efforts the Soviet state poured into creating strong morale and motivation. Credit,… show more.

Mary Leder was an American teenager in the 1930s when her Jewish socialist immigrant parents, poverty-stricken by the Great Depression, decided to return to Russia to build a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan. After a brief period of difficulty, they left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States, but Leder was detained due to passport difficulties.

In this moving memoir, she discusses her life in Moscow as a student, a factory worker, an editor, and a young wife and mother. She provides a tragic and compelling account of the repressions of the 1930s, the chaotic evacuation of Moscow in 1941 as the Germans approached the city, the death of her baby girl in evacuation, and the growing anti-Semitism after the war.  At one point she shared a communal apartment with a young, very kind Vietnamese revolutionary who she later learned was Ho Chi Minh. The journey she narrates, from… show more.

Most Western readers are familiar with the holocaust carried out by the Nazis in Europe, but know little about the almost two million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Here, the Germans embarked on a “holocaust by bullets,” rounding up the Jewish inhabitants, imprisoning them in camps and ghettos, and then shooting them at the edge of vast pits and ravines. 

Grossman and Ehrenburg, renowned Soviet war journalists and members of the Jewish Anti Fascist Committee, began collecting eyewitness testimonies and other documents during the war. Yet the Soviet state, following the policy, “we do not divide the dead,” refused to permit publication of the book they assembled because it was too focused on the particularity of Jewish suffering. The Complete Black Book, a powerful compilation of firsthand reports, is essential to understanding the full scope of the German campaign for Jewish… show more.

I was consumed by this harrowing account of Kaliningrad, a city caught between Hitler and Stalin, and how the people there fought, collaborated with, and suffered from both armies.

Without reviving the tired “who was worse” debates about Hitler and Stalin, this book shows readers the unique horrors that each regime visited upon the local population during the war and for decades afterward, as Stalin tried to denazify its German residents. Huge questions of purity, morality, and humanness undergird this searing story about surviving two of the most violent regimes in history. 

If there is one war book that gives me chills, this is it. What do people think on the eve of their execution? How do they confront their own deaths, and what final words do they want to leave behind? I feel overcome every time I read this collection of letters, mostly from civilians who knew they were about to die at the hands of the Nazis.

Some letters are from young girls who had been enslaved, drew pictures, and recalled their birthday parties in their final letters to their parents. Others are from fathers and prisoners of war giving advice to the children they would never meet. Some of the “letters” are long and detailed, while others were simply slogans etched in the walls of prisons by those staring down the abyss of death.

All of them are saturated with pain and grief, yet the messages of love they… show more.

This is one of my all-time favorite children’s WW2 books set on America’s home front. The year is 1944, and Lily is off to spend another magical summer in Rockaway. The beach and the boardwalk, the swimming and fishing, and her friend Margaret are waiting. But the summer soon begins to fall apart. Margaret and her family are leaving for a town in Michigan where her father has a job in a wartime factory. And her own father reveals that he is about to work as an engineer for the army somewhere in Europe.

Loneliness sets in until Lily meets an orphaned boy named Albert, a Hungarian refugee who is spending the summer with relatives. Albert’s parents have been taken by the Nazis, and his sister, Ruth, is left behind in France. Lily and Albert have much to learn from each other, and much to share. This book tells a… show more.

I was immediately drawn to this book. I knew this story. A childhood friend’s family had fled the Russian army when they invaded Estonia during World War II. So it is easy for me to believe, counter-intuitive as it may seem, that an unlikely group of Eastern European refugees would flee the advancing Russian army, hoping for safety in Germany.

I loved their “found family.” How many of us, far from where we grew up, turn to friends for support? But Sepetys’ group boards the ill-fated Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship carrying 10,000 refugees. Based on the true story of a maritime disaster, the novel highlights how war creates victims on all sides but also how people rise to help each other face unimaginable challenges.