Books like A woman in Berlin by Philip Boehm

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.

Browning’s book reveals how ordinary middle‑aged Germans of Reserve Police Battalion 101 became silent mass murderers during the Holocaust.

George L. Hicks exposes the organized system of Japanese ‘comfort stations’ in World War II, detailing how women were coerced into prostitution and how the Japanese government concealed the atrocity.

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

Elie Wiesel chronicles the harrowing realities of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and how witnessing the loss of family and friends transformed his faith.

During the German occupation of France, 230 female Resistance fighters were captured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where their courage, defiance, and enduring friendship are chronicled for the first time.

From the Publisher: In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women-mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army-endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women-a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors-from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women's human rights movement-that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.