Books like A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

Vera Brittain's memoir chronicles her journey from Oxford scholar to wartime nurse, chronicling the loss of a generation and her transformation into a pacifist and feminist.

"Three Came Home" tells of the author's time in Japanese POW and civilian internee camps in North Borneo and Sarawak, and was made into a film of the same name in 1950. It describes Keith's life in North Borneo in the period immediately before the Japanese invasion in 1942, and her subsequent internment and suffering, separated from her husband Harry, and with a young son to care for. Keith was initially interned at Berhala Island near Sandakan, North Borneo (today's Sabah) but spent most of her captivity at Batu Lintang camp at Kuching, Sarawak. The camp was liberated in September, 1945.

A memoir tracing Kim Sunee’s journey from abandoned Korean child to adopted New Orleans family, through love and culinary discovery in France, exploring identity, food, and family.

April-May, 1945 Berlin-A Perilous Place For A Woman!, April 22, 2009 By Bernie Weisz "a historian specializing in the Vietnam War (Pembroke Pines,Florida) E mail:[email protected] Written originally for Amazon.com April 22, 2009 This review is from: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (Paperback) The Diary "A Woman In Berlin 8 weeks In The Conquered City" was written by an anonymous author for obvious reasons. I like to use actual quotes that the author used to explain the meaning of this book, as this truly conveys without any "subjective idiosyncratic coloring" what the writer is actually trying to say. Basically, this anonymous author, kept a written diary for 8 weeks in 1945, as Berlin, Germany fell to the approaching Communist Russian Army from the East. The first entry was recorded on Friday, April 20th, 1945 and the final one came on Thursday, June 14th, 1945. Quite a bit of history occurred during these 8 weeks, of which the most significant was the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30th, 1945 and the subsequent unconditional surrender of Germany to both the Allies and the Soviets. This woman was alone in Berlin at the time and kept a daily record of her and her neighbor's experiences in an attempt to both keep her sanity and record the plight of millions of Germans who expected the wrath and revenge of the oncoming Soviets. With what I called "gallows humor", the anonymous author describes in detail her conditions in a ravaged apartment building and how it's little group of residents struggled to get by amongst falling Soviet shells, death and rubble, with severe conditions such as no food, heat and water. The author also describes vividly how her fellow apartment dwellers displayed character traits ranging from chivalry and protectionism to cravenness and corruption, depraved first by hunger and then by the Russians. The reader will in shocking and vivid detail find out about the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city were unequivocally subjected to, i.e. the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age, social class or infirmity. To give the author credit, she did maintain throughout this book her resilience, decency, and fierce will to come through Berlin's trial until normalcy and safety returned somewhat. This book was first published 8 years after Germany's surrender (1953), but with public sentiment to put the specter of the war behind the public's view, it quickly disappeared from libraries and bookstores, lingering in obscurity for decades before it slowly reemerged. After it's reissuance, it became an international phenomenon over half a century after it was written. The book's forward describes the amazing way this diary was written: "The author, a woman in Berlin, took meticulous note of everything that happened to her as well as her neighbors from late April to mid-June 1945-a time when Germany was defeated, Hitler committed suicide, and Berlin was occupied by the Red Army. While we cannot know whether the author kept the diary with eventual publication in mind, it's clear that the "private scribblings" she jotted down in 3 notebooks (and a few hastily added slips of paper) served primarily to help her maintain a remnant of sanity in a world of havoc and moral breakdown. Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know (Revised and Expanded) The earliest entries were literally notes from the underground, recorded in a basement where the author sought shelter from air raids, artillery fire, looters, and ultimately rape by the victorious Russians. With nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity, she recorded her observations, which were at first severely limited by her confinement in the basement and dearth of information. In the absence of newspapers, radio, and telephones, rumor was the sole source of news about the outside world. As a semblence of normalicy returned to the city, the author expande

Howard K. Smith’s memoir chronicles his days as an American war correspondent in Berlin during Hitler’s rise, detailing the regime’s manipulation of the German people, the Nazi youth, and the high command before his 1941 exit.

May Smith’s wartime diaries chronicle life on Britain’s Home Front—evacuees, sirens, and the quiet joys of tennis and holiday trips—offering a witty, personal glimpse into 1940‑45.

A city‑born woman trades sushi for safari as she follows a Peace Corps recruiter to Ecuador, then Uganda, finding love and purpose amid malaria, civil war, and cultural clashes.

"This book challenges the assumption that men write of war, women of the hearth. The Lebanese war has seen the publication of many more works of fiction by women than by men. Miriam Cooke has termed these women the Beirut Decentrists, as they are decentered or excluded from both literary canon and social discourse.". "Although they may not share religious or political affiliation, they do share a perspective which holds them together. Cooke traces the transformation in consciousness that has taken place among women who observed and recorded the progress towards chaos in Lebanon.". "During the so-called "two-year" war of 1975-76, little comment was made about those (usually men in search of economic security) who left the saturnalia of violence, but with time attitudes changed. Women became aware that they had remained out of a sense of responsibility for others and that they had survived. Consciousness of survival was catalytic: the Beirut Decentrists began to describe a society that had gone beyond the masculinization normal in most wars and achieved an almost unprecedented femininization. Emigration, the expected behavior for men before 1975, was rejected. Staying, the expected behavior for women before 1975, became the sine qua non for Lebanese citizenship.". "The writings of the Beirut Decentrists offer hope of an escape from the anarchy. If men and women could espouse the Lebanese women's sense of responsibility, the energy that had fueled the unrelenting savagery could be turned to reconstruction. But that was before the invasion of 1982."--BOOK JACKET.

Contains primary source material.

A determined twenty‑one leaves home to train as a nurse in wartime London, where she falls in love with an RAF officer amid the Blitz and the chaos of World War II.