Here are 100 books that Primo Levi's Resistance fans have personally recommended if you like
Primo Levi's Resistance.
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My reading is almost entirely influenced by my own family’s extraordinary history. My mother and father-in-law were both illegitimate. Both suffered for the fact and my father-in-law was 11 years old when he first found out and was reunited with his mother, albeit on a second-class basis compared to his half siblings. My mother trained bomb aimers. My father flew Lancaster bombers and was just 19 years old in the skies above wartime Berlin. My own books combine history, my personal experiences, and my family’s past to weave wartime stories exploring the strains that those conflicts imposed on friendships.
An abiding theme within my own book is that love and friendship can supplant racial and cultural differences, and this book, set in a village in France during the 2nd World War, highlights a growing and reluctant friendship between an occupier and the occupied.
The hatred that invasion induces causes any fraternisation to be labelled ‘collaboration.’ Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it is just people caught out of context seeking comfort and normality.
It is easy for those whose countries have never been occupied to scoff at the behaviour of those who had to live in the atmosphere and the reality of a hostile invasion. Let’s hope we never have to find out firsthand.
In 1941, Irene Nemirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through, not in terms of battles and politicians, but by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. She did not live to see her ambition fulfilled, or to know that sixty-five years later, "Suite Francaise" would be published for the first time, and hailed as a masterpiece. Set during a year that begins with France's fall to the Nazis in June 1940 and ends with Germany turning its attention to Russia, "Suite Francaise" falls…
I’m a Lithuanian-American with a Chinese name, thanks to my husband. Thirty years ago, I found papers among my uncle’s possessions telling a WWII story about our ancestral Lithuania. I had heard about it in broad terms, but I could hardly believe what I was reading. I spent years validating the material. The result was Amber Wolf, a historical novel about a war within the war: the fight against the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe. While many countries were involved in separate struggles, I focused on Lithuania and their David and Goliath fight against the Russian army. After all this time, the story still moves me.
Mr. Lowe’s meticulous research of post-WWII Europe gives startling insight into how devastated the continent was after the war.
He paints a picture of lawlessness and depravity, arguably as bad as battle conditions had been. In some cases, it might have been worse. Revenge killings, rapes, and starvation were among the horrors. It begs the question, when did WWII really end?
Keith Lowe's Savage Continent is an awe-inspiring portrait of how Europe emerged from the ashes of WWII.
The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror.
Praise for Savage Continent:
'Deeply harrowing, distinctly troubling. Moving, measured and provocative. A compelling and…
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs, and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show My Whorizontal Life: The Show!. I'm co-host of the podcast My Index to Sex, and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. My desire in writing about the secret work of love and pleasure is first to create unexpected delight by leading the reader or audience into the surprisingly fascinating, funny, wild, misunderstood, and imagined life underground where so many women secretly work. Through my writing, I hope to give an authentic voice, knowledgeable, true, and uncynical to this experience.
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…
For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Gemma is the bestselling author of historical fiction novels, translated into several languages. Set against the backdrop of war in Europe, her fifth book in this genre will be released later this year. She has combined the war experiences of family members in WWI and WWII, information collected during her research and travels, and her academic studies in writing and history, to create the authentic scenes and characters for her books.
This 900-page history is a vivid account of WWII across all fronts. Though the research is meticulous and covers the length of the war, the explanations are clear and fascinating and the chronology makes it feel like a guided tour through time. Along the way, Gilbert interposes a human face and a very personal account, revealing upheaval and atrocities, but ensuring that there is a permanent record of those civilians, particularly Jews, who died without just cause. And the examples and conditions endured are at times difficult to read and heartbreaking. The book covers all aspects, from battle lines to partisan attacks, to numbers killed, to firsthand accounts, to Hitler’s inners circle, and more. This is an outstanding read and this book is just one of Gilbert’s many significant contributions as a historian.
Originally published by Weidenfeld in 1989 and now available in paperback, a history of the Second World War, which looks at its political, diplomatic, military and civilian aspects.
I’m the author/illustrator of over 20 books for children, ranging from whimsical fiction about anthropomorphic cats and rambunctious dogs to serious nonfiction about hidden children, unusual heroes and surprising spies of WWII and the Holocaust. Several of my nonfiction books, including The Grand Mosque of Paris, were created in collaboration.
Gino Bartali was a world-famous champion cyclist from Italy. But the world only learned many years later that he was also secretly working for the Italian resistance during WWII to help save the lives of hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children. He acted as a courier, delivering crucial identity papers and other documents that he had rolled up and hidden in the frame of his bike. Everybody recognized the champion and cheered him on as he raced by. They assumed he was in training. They had no idea that he was using his skills to help battle the enemy and save lives.
This picture book pops with jaunty graphics and eye-catching illustrations that have a retro feel. The story is exciting and rich with detail.
This 2021 National Jewish Book Award finalist by author Megan Hoyt and illustrator Iacopo Bruno brings to light the inspiring, true story of Gino Bartali, a beloved Italian cyclist and secret champion in the fight for Jewish lives during World War II.
Gino Bartali pedaled across Italy for years, winning one cycling race after another, including the 1938 Tour de France. Gino became an international sports hero! But the next year, World War II began, and it changed everything. Soldiers marched into Italy. Tanks rolled down the cobbled streets of Florence. And powerful leaders declared that Jewish people should be…
I'm a child of Holocaust survivors who spent three years in slave labour camps. My mother told me stories of her experiences a child should probably not hear. The result is that my philosophy of life, and sometimes my writing, can be dark. It’s no surprise that this period of history imbues my novels. I chose to write mysteries to reach a wider audience, the Holocaust connections integral to the stories. During my research, I discovered a wealth of information on the Holocaust but learned that memoirs revealed best what happened to people on the ground. Memoirs draw you into the microcosm of a person’s life with its nostalgia, yearning, and inevitable heartbreak.
Elsa Thon recounts her war experiences in a cinematic tale with the eye of an artist. A teenager in Poland who had apprenticed in photo retouching, she was recruited by the Jewish underground. She left her family behind in the Warsaw Ghetto, ending up in Krakow with false papers. This was difficult for her, a deeply honest person. She writes, “I lied all the time.” She takes the reader with her on her dangerous journey, the degradation of a labour camp, and a forced march. Elsa was also a student in my seniors writing class and I found her to be generous and good-humoured, despite her painful past. She lost her whole family in the Holocaust but she writes that it was her “destiny” to survive.
Elsa Thon was a sixteen-year-old photographer's apprentice when the Nazis occupied her town of Pruszków, Poland. When her family was sent to the Warsaw ghetto, Elsa joined a community farm and was recruited by the Underground. Despite her deep belief in destiny, Elsa refused to bow to her fate as a Jew in war-torn Poland.
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States…
Sarah Sundin’s 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 stories—of people who chose kindness and courage and right in trying times—are 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 officer—and 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 racism—and 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 and―decades later―a 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 storehouse…
I was born in Israel, a third generation to holocaust survivors and seventh generation to farmers from the Galilee, living with my family in Brooklyn, NY. I was raised by a concentration camp survivor grandfather, whose miraculous story I recorded and documented since early childhood. My painful family heritage made me passionate about 1930s and 1940s Europe, social and political processes that allowed fascism and nationalism to prevail over the frail democracies, and how ordinary people found their world shattered overnight, and had to find ways to stay alive. The books on my list represent small stories, about the human condition under inhumane conditions, told by talented storytellers.
I appreciated the author’s meticulously researched account of her parents' remarkable survival in Poland.
Her writing is very emotional yet beautiful and fact-based. The details capture the complexity of survival during these dark days. Moreover, she is able to convey the randomness of individual outcomes, and the unfathomable resilience of the ones who managed to stay alive and tell their tale.
"This is a moving remembrance, as historically edifying as it is dramatically affecting; it’s also a marvelous amalgam of scholarly objectivity and poignant psychological reflection. A gripping work of familial history. " – Kirkus Reviews
When the Germans march into their little Polish shtetl at the start of the Second World War, the Jews of Włodawa see their lives abruptly torn apart. For Hil and Alexandra it marks the beginning of a struggle to survive during which they will experience ghettos, roundups, will need to use hiding places and false identities – a struggle where the line between life and…
Professor Elie Wiesel was instrumental in my translating and researching my mother’s 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 “the banality of evil." Not monsters, but ordinary people were able to follow Hitler’s 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.
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, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the…
I became interested in the Holocaust and the Second World War during my senior year of high school. I took a literature class entitled “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” which focused a great deal on the literature that emerged from the Holocaust. At the end of the year, I had the great honor to meet author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who had actually read my essay (my teacher knew him, and gave it to him to read) and encouraged me to keep writing. I am fascinated by stories of survival and the quiet heroism that characterized women like Ida and Louise Cook.
Berta Geissmar was the Jewish secretary and confidante to legendary German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler beginning in 1921.
In her memoir, published in 1944, Geissmar describes how the Nazi hierarchy interfered in the world of classical music, purging orchestras of Jewish musicians and banning works by Jewish composers. Although Furtwangler at first refused to do the bidding of the Nazis, he was eventually sidelined. And Geissmar soon became a Nazi target.
They blamed her for the bad publicity that the regime was getting in the classical music world, and seized her passport. Geissmar was eventually allowed to leave the country, and, ended up in London as the secretary of another legendary conductor—Sir Thomas Beecham.
