Books like Light of Days by Judy Batalion

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

The diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl hiding with her family in Amsterdam during WWII, recorded daily life, hopes, and fears, becoming a global testament to the Holocaust.

A 1930s wartime tale of a blind French girl and a German boy whose lives intersect in occupied France, weaving themes of survival, friendship, and the moral choices people make amid World War II.

Sisters Vianne and Isabelle are pulled into the turmoil of World War II, each forging a path of courage and resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.

In 1941 Lithuania, fifteen‑year‑old Lina and her family are deported by the Soviets to a Siberian labor camp; through art and resilience they endure brutal conditions and strive to survive the long journey ahead.

An American college girl in 1947 discovers her belated quest to uncover the fate of her vanished French cousin during WWI, leading her to the shadowy Alice Network where a former spy haunted by betrayal seeks vengeance.

During World War II in Warsaw, the Zabinskis run the city’s zoo while secretly aiding the resistance to rescue Jews from the ghetto.

Memoirs of the author's experiences during the Holocaust. Born in Warsaw, she was ten years old at the time of the German occupation. Relates her internment in the Warsaw ghetto, and in the camps Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Glewe, until the liberation.

Herman Kruk’s meticulously translated diaries chronicle his journey from refugee to Vilna Ghetto survivor, documenting daily resistance and the tragic fate of Lithuania’s Jewish community during the Holocaust.

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust years is one of helpless victims under a death sentence, unable to fight consignment to the ghettos, to the camps, and to the gas chambers. In fact, many Jews struggled alone or with others against the terrors of the Third Reich, risking their lives against overwhelming odds for the slimmest chance of survival, or a mere glimpse of freedom. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944--the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Describing the entire partisan movement in the region, Tec shows that while most forest fighters in Belorussia were rifle-carrying young men, the members of this extraordinary community included both men and women, some with weapons but mostly unarmed, ranging from infants to the elderly. She reconstructs for the first time the amazing details of how these partisans and their families--hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather, always on the lookout for German patrols--managed not only to survive, but to offer protection to all Jewish fugitives who could find their way to them. Driven by courage born out of despair, they dug wells, set up workshops to repair guns, made clothes, and resoled shoes, supplied services to other guerilla units, and even established a makeshift hospital and school in the forest. Arguing that this success would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski, and his journey from his life as the son of the only Jewish peasant family in an isolated rural village to his emergence as a leader possessing the charisma and courage to command under all but impossible circumstances. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis against their former Jewish neighbors. Refusing to turn away the weak or the old for the sake of the survival of the larger group, Bielski would warn new arrivals to the forest, "Life is difficult, we are in danger all the time, but if we perish, if we die, we die like human beings." A scholar, a writer, and herself a Holocaust survivor, author Nechama Techas devoted the last two decades to studying the fate of European Jewry, recording rare but vital examples of human compassion, resistance, altruism and heroism in the face of overwhelming horror and despair. Drawing on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself two weeks before his death in 1987--she reconstructs here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight.