Fiction France Historical Historical Fiction Holocaust War World War II

The Kindly Ones

Name: The Kindly Ones
Rating: 4.03 (14956 reviews)
Author: Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell August 21, 2006

4.03 15k Ratings

Ongoing Status

14 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

Named one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times of London

“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”

A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, he is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss—even Hitler himself—play a role in Max’s story. An intense and hallucinatory historical epic, The Kindly Ones is also a morally challenging read. It holds a mirror up to humanity—and the reader cannot look away.

Books similar to The Kindly Ones

Those Who Save Us

★ 4.11

Jenna Blum

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.

Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.

War and Remembrance

★ 4.43

Herman Wouk

War and Remembrance is a historical romance. The subject is World War II, the viewpoint American. A prologue, The Winds of War, published in 1971, set the historical frame for this work by picturing the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. This is a novel of America at war, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

Sarah’s Key

★ 4.18

Tatiana de Rosnay

Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. but before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.
(front flap)

The Voyage

★ 4.11

Roberta Kagan

On May 13th 1939, five strangers boarded the MS St. Louis, Promised a future of safety away from Nazi Germany and Hitler’s third Reich unbeknownst to them they were about to embark upon a voyage built on secrets, lies, and treachery. Sacrifice, love, life, and death hung in the balance as each fought against fate but the voyage was just the beginning.

The Invisible Bridge

★ 4.18

Julie Orringer

A grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he becomes involved with the letter’s recipient, his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena, their younger brother leaves school for the stage—and Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty.

From the Hungarian village of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s garret to the enduring passion he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of a Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the unforgettable story of brothers bound by history and love, of a marriage tested by disaster, of a Jewish family’s struggle against annihilation, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Length: 27 hrs and 51 mins

You Are My Sunshine

★ 4.19

Roberta Kagan

You Are My Sunshine, is the sequel to All My Love, Detrick, this bestselling novel is set during the holocaust.

When Helga Haswell becomes pregnant by a married SS officer who abandons her, she finds herself alone and desperate. She is afraid to tell her parents that she is pregnant out of wedlock, so her doctor suggests that Helga check into Heinrich Himmler’s home for the Lebensborn.

This is a program, he explains, that has been instituted by the Nazi’s to create perfect Aryan babies. Since Helga is of pure German blood and the child’s father is an SS officer, she will be accepted, the doctor explains. Her child will have a good life because adoption is available only to the finest of Hitler’s Elite. Not only this, the doctor says but during her pregnancy, Helga will have the finest food and medical care available. And, instead of a life of shame, she will be honored for her efforts in producing a perfect Aryan child for the new world that Hitler is in the process of creating. Then after the baby is born, the Lebensborn will take the child and assume all future responsibilities releasing Helga to live her life without the burden of a fatherless offspring. In her desperation, all of this sounded perfect to Helga, that was of course before she felt life stir within her womb.

However, by the time this occurred it was already too late. She had already moved into Steinhoring, home for the Lebensorn, and there was no possibility of turning back. The papers were signed. She could not escape. Hitler owned her unborn child.
On a cold day in January Helga’s little girl came into the world. But instead of being sheltered by her mother’s arms, she was torn away by the nurses at the home for the Lebensborn and thrust into a treacherous world where the very people sworn to protect her were not what they seemed. The little girl was growing, and she was amongst some of the cruelest people on earth and subjected daily to the ideology of the Third Reich.

But when Hitler became convinced that he was indestructible and, went to war on two fronts dividing his army, Germany began to fall. The Nazi’s became fearful as America entered the war joining Churchill against them in the west, while Stalin a formidable enemy with the brutal Russian winters on his side, ripped them apart in the east. And so, the tables turned on the Third Reich. The cruel Nazi’s, who believed they could not be defeated were about to swallow their pride and surrender at the feet of the Allies. The superior race would prove to be inferior after all. Hitler’s elite would run for cover, some would commit suicide; some would be tried in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, while others would escape with their tails tucked between their legs and head for South America or other friendly ports.

But God had other plans for Helga’s tiny innocent child, who had been born on that January morning. The child’s life was about to change in a very strange but significant way. Instead of becoming whom and what the Nazi’s had hoped to create, this child would be befriended and nurtured by the most unexpected people.

Skeletons at the Feast

★ 4

Chris Bohjalian

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.

Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.

As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred–assuming any of them even survive.

Perhaps not since The English Patient has a novel so deftly captured both the power and poignancy of romance and the terror and tragedy of war. Skillfully portraying the flesh and blood of history, Chris Bohjalian has crafted a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies–while creating, perhaps, a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations.

Mila 18

★ 4.32

Leon Uris

It was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy and a time of transcendent courage and determination. Leon Uris's novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling story of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.