100 books like The Light of Days

This novel left me feeling both teary-eyed and ennobled. Superficially, it is about two French sisters living through the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. At its root, however, Hannah deconstructs the essence of survival.

I loved how her characters frame the book’s cosmic questions: What would you do to survive? What compromises would you make? Is it better to fight back aggressively or resist passively? The sisters are of different temperaments and personalities. Each answers these questions differently, painfully. I found myself haunted by these themes long after I put The Nightingale back on the shelf. You will, too.

In this remarkable combination of memoir and scholarly work, Philippe Sands, a British lawyer actively engaged in support of human rights, combines the story of his own Eastern European Jewish family with those of two jurists who forged the legal framework for the Nuremberg trials: Hersch Lauterpacht, who developed the concept of “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term “genocide” to describe what was taking place. Both men and Sands’s maternal grandfather hailed from Lwów, part of southern Poland before the war, and now Lviv, in Ukraine. 

All had relatives murdered in the Holocaust. They were determined to prosecute those responsible and establish an international framework for the protection of human rights and played an important part in the trials at Nuremberg. 

This remarkable book shows how it is possible to encapsulate the history of the mass murder of the Jews in the former Soviet Union in a single object, in this case, a photograph that documents the horrific final moments in the life of a Jewish family, one of the nearly 1.5 million Jews shot by the Germans and their collaborators after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Wendy Lower was able to locate the killing site and find the identities of the mother and her children and of the killers. I was deeply moved by the way it enables one to put a human face on the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust, and, in particular, the women and children who constituted an important part of the victims.

You can feel the danger lurking behind every day as radio journalist Shirer watched Hitler build on one horror after another.

Reynolds writes in a way you can hear him, in a stye that echoed his broadcasts. Even after the declaration of war, “life here is still quite normal… the theatres and movies, all open and jammed.”

And this item when he went to the front: “At last will get a chance–maybe–to see how this German colossus has been doing it, walking through Belgium, Holland and now, Northern France, so fast.”

What I like about Shirer’s approach is that he takes you along with him on every day’s events. There were so many things he touched on that often got missed in other books. I enjoyed being with him each day and you will, too.

During August 1944, Joe Mower’s P-38 was shot down, and Nazi forces sent him to Buchenwald—the infamous work camp where tens of thousands died of cruelty, medical experiments, and starvation. It’s a story of survival in the worst of situations.

A remarkable novel about Truus Wijsmuller, a very brave woman in the Netherlands, resisting the Nazis by smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. A very moving and true story. The role of women in the resistance movement in the Netherlands has been neglected or underrepresented for way too long, so this story helps to shed light on the active resistance women carried out in WWII. This is exactly what my platform ‘Sophie’s Women of War’ sheds light on. 

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all aspects of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve this history for posterity.

As the Final Solution unfolded, although decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than sixty members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family and the family hiding them perished in March 1944, when their hiding place outside the ghetto was denounced by a neighbor.

Most of the archive was dug up after the war, and, in my view, it is one of the most important sources for the history of the Jews at this tragic time. 

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to escape from Auschwitz—one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. His aim was to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the still surviving Jews of his native Czechoslovakia and Hungary and the world of the nature of Nazi policy towards the Jews. 

Sadly, his warnings were not taken sufficiently seriously. The problem was the inability of those to whom he reported to take in the full implications of the ‘final solution.’ Vrba was tormented for the rest of his life (he died in Canada in 2006) by his failure to persuade his interlocutors of what was actually taking place in Auschwitz.

Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.

I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.

I am crazy about this book, as this book almost made me crazy (in a good sense).

It tells the story of one of the most famous holocaust survivors and writers and how the nightmares from the concentration camp, known as Auschwitz, haunted this survivor. He suffered for years until he was treated with LSD. His mind was changed for the better. He stopped dreaming about the suffering he had experienced, and this was done by changing his consciousness.

It shows how much our mind is open to improvements and what is the real power and benefit of practicing shamanism and altered states of consciousness. And how it worked for many years for our ancestors, and how we can benefit from it nowadays. Such a powerful and hope-making book!