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World War II: True Stories of Courage
WWII Memoirs
Return to Fiction_L Booklists Menu
August 2002
Compiled by Nancy Mulder
, from contributions by the members of Fiction_L.
(To use this list in your library, book club, etc., please include the following credit line: "Compiled by the subscribers of the Fiction_L mailing list." This list may not be used for commercial purposes.)
- Atkinson, Linda In Kindling Flame: The Story of Hannah Senesh, 1921-1944.
- A brave Hungarian Jewish teenager's diaries and letters reveal remarkable heroism in the face of overwhelming odds.
- Bradley, James. Flags of our Fathers.
- The son of one of the flagraisers at Iwo Jima has written a powerful account of six very different men who came together in a moment that will live forever.
- Brysac, Shareen Blair Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra: The Life and Death of an American Woman in Nazi Germany.
- The gripping and heartbreaking biography of the only American woman executed for espionage by the Nazis.
- Eman, Diet The Things We Couldn't Say.
- The courageous life-saving efforts of Diet and her fiancˇ ultimately saved the lives of hundred of Dutch Jews in occupied Holland.
- Gray, Martin. For Those I Loved.
- A riveting memoir of a young man who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the gas chambers at Treblinka, lost his entire family, joined the Polish underground and eventually ended up in America.
- Gause, Damon L. The War Journal of Major Damon "Rocky" Gause.
- One man's chronicle of his incredible 159-day escape from the infamous Bataan Death March and harrowing voyage across the Pacific in a leaky, wooden boat.
- Gies, Miep Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman who Helped to Hide the Frank Family.
- Miep and her husband risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. Then she found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope.
- Howarth, David The Shetland Bus.
- We Die Alone.
- One reviewer called this "epic of escape and endurance...one of the finest narratives of adventure called forth by the splendors and miseries of WWII." A tale of Norwegian resistance.
- Kelly, Clara Olink The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage.
- As a small child, Kelly spent nearly four years in a brutal Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia during WWII. She survived only because of her mother.
- Klein, Gerda Weissmann All But My Life.
- A classic of Holocaust literature, called "the ultimate lesson inhumanity, hope, and friendship," this book recounts Klein's years as a prisoner of the Nazis, including a forced march from Germany to Czechoslovakia, until her miraculous liberation.
- Lobel, Anita. No Pretty Pictures.
- This Caldecott-winning illustrator was captured at age 5 when the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She now lives and works in New York.
- Marks, Leo. Between Silk and Cynanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945.
- A mesmerizing account of WWII as fought on the home front in Great Britain by ingenious codemakers.
- Norman, Elizabeth M. We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese.
- In this moving true story, women nurses are held captive under the harshest conditions imaginable in the jungles of the Philippines during World War II.
- Opdyke, Irene Gut In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer.
- When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, 16 year old Irene escaped into German-occupied territory, where she was forced to work for the German army. "A harrowing and deeply affecting story of resistance."
- Rawicz, Slavomir The Long Walk.
- In 1940, Rawicz and six comrades from various countries escaped from a labor camp in the Siberian Gulag and made their way, on foot, thousands of miles south to British India, where Rawicz reenlisted in the Polish army and fought against the Germans.
- Ryan, Cornelius. The Longest Day.
- Shiber, Etta. Paris-Underground.
- In this compelling classic account, an American and a British woman were living in Paris when Germany invaded. When they became involved in secretly transporting stranded English soldiers out of occupied France, they were apprehended and thrown into jail. Compelling reading.
- Wake, Nancy The White Mouse.
- In a tale of remarkable heroism, young Nancy Wake, though used to a life of luxury, rallied a motley band of 7000 undisciplined men to fight against the Germans.
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