100 books like When Time Stopped

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… show more.

A bit dry and occasionally over-focused on rattling off official numbers and unit designations, The Fall Of Berlin is also a low-key horror novel. Surrounded on all sides by a massive Russian army hell-bent on revenge, the people of Berlin are caught between those invaders and their own leadership forcing them into a suicidal last stand. The scale of brutality is numbing; this is a battle fought without mercy by two adversaries locked in a death struggle.

Bloodlands is a story about the dead. Using archives made available after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Mr. Snyder sheds light on both Stalin’s and Hitler’s brutality.

In a confined area that includes just eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, 14 million civilians died from the 1930s to the end of the war. Most were either starved or shot. Even more startling were the plans to kill millions more.

Stalin said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Mr. Snyder reminds us of the tragedy.

To learn about the Holocaust, I read personal remembrances, eyewitness accounts, and detailed descriptions of ghettos, camps, and transports, but this graphic novel based on Spiegelman’s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words can’t say, both as his father lived it and as his son learns about it. Banning it from U.S. schools would be completely wrongheaded. It should be required reading.

This book is unequaled for its raw, inspiring portrayal of human resilience. Louis Zamperini's journey from troubled youth to Olympian to war hero captivated me from the first page. I was deeply moved by his unwavering spirit in the face of unimaginable hardships, especially during his harrowing 46 days at sea and brutal experiences as a POW.

I felt as if I were right there with Louis, experiencing every triumph and setback. What touched me most was Louis's eventual path to forgiveness and redemption. His ability to overcome trauma and alcoholism, rekindle his marriage, and find peace left me in awe. This book reminded me of the incredible strength of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. I couldn't put it down and still find myself thinking about Louis's remarkable story.

Matthew Rozell was teaching history in Hudson Falls, NY, when he asked his students to find people in town who had served in World War II. Interviewing them was very well received and became his passion. By 2004, he had published his first book of interviews with WWII veterans. Since then, he has produced seven additional volumes, spanning both European and Pacific Theaters. Face-to-face interviews are becoming harder to come by and Rozell did a wonderful job for history in compiling personal descriptions that detail the daily lives of soldiers in WWII.

I haven’t found anyone better at describing the personal situations and experiences of soldiers in war than Ernie Pyle. In this compilation, he interviews soldiers at every level, in a wide variety of duties, with honesty, directness, humor, and literary style. It is no wonder that his syndicated columns appeared in over 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers, making him the voice of war-time America.

Concentration and termination camps may have been one of the topics least talked about by those who saw them. This catalog of text and photos was created for the 2003 documentary exhibition at the Dachau Concentration Memorial Site, created by survivors of the camp and an International Committee. Dachau developed and tested the appalling procedures that became standard for the whole network of camps in Europe. I recommend the book for its concise history, chronologies, maps, biographical sketches of prisoners and officers, and hundreds of photos. They are invaluable as a case study of how the Holocaust was designed and implemented.

Eisen was a fifteen-year-old boy in 1944 when the Nazis sent him and his family to Auschwitz-Berkenau to become slave labour. He tells the story after seventy years, recalling the back-breaking work and his survival through luck or chance and the kindness of some good people. This is a “must-read” for anyone who thinks that this atrocity didn’t or couldn’t happen in our modern world, and an inspiration to those of us who sometimes feel our own struggles are insurmountable. This book touched me personally because my own children’s grandfather was sent to the same concentration camp.

What I appreciate about Hunter's novel is that it takes a new approach to the subject of the Holocaust. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kurcs, a Polish-Jewish family, find themselves driven into another diaspora, with their family members cast to the four corners of the globe. Hunter touches on the plight of Poland during the early years of the war when the country was torn asunder by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. The plot follows the various family members as they struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland, in Stalin's Gulag, and as one member tries to flee to South America. A big, sprawling, family epic filled with tragedy and humanity, brutality and heroism.