Lale Sokolov, a Jew from Slovakia, is forcibly sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in April 1942. He is hired as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), entrusted with permanently marking his fellow inmates after his captors learned that he speaks multiple languages.
Lale, who has been jailed for more than 2.5 years, sees unbelievable acts of courage and kindness in addition to horrifying horrors and cruelty. He puts his own life in danger by using his position of power to buy food for his fellow captives by exchanging jewelry and money from dead Jews.
Lale, prisoner 32407, offers support to a young woman who is shaking while in line to have the tattoo of the number 34902 applied on her arm one day in July 1942. Gita is her name, and Lale makes a promise to marry her and somehow makes it through the camp when they first meet.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a vivid, harrowing, and finally hopeful recreation of Lale Sokolov’s life experience as the man who tattooed one of the most powerful symbols of the Holocaust on the arms of thousands of prisoners. It is also a testament to the resilience of love and humanity in the worst possible circumstances.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day.”
“To save one is to save the world,”
“remember the small things, and the big things will work themselves out.”
“We stand in shit but let us not drown in it.”
“I know he is not perfect, but I also know he will always put me first.”
Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the victorious, epic account of one young man’s tremendous fortitude and resiliency during one of history’s darkest periods. It is based on the true story of a forgotten hero.
Pino Lella is opposed to both the Nazis and the war. He is a typical Italian adolescent who is fascinated with food, music, and girls, but his days of youth are numbered. Pino joins an underground railroad to aid Jews fleeing from the Alps when the bombs dropped by the Allies destroy his family’s home in Milan. He also falls in love with Anna, a stunning widow who is six years his senior. Pino’s parents push him to enlist as a German soldier in an effort to protect him, believing that this will keep him out of battle.
However, after Pino is hurt, he is hired at the young age of eighteen to work as General Hans Leyers’s personal driver in Italy. General Leyers was one of the Third Reich’s most enigmatic and powerful commanders. Now that he has the chance to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino fights covertly while enduring the atrocities of the war and the Nazi occupation, his fortitude inspired by his love for Anna and the future he hopes they will one day have. This captivating tale of history, suspense, and love will appeal to fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“How do you find happiness?” Anna paused, then said, “You start by looking right around you for the blessings you have.”
“The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the new people life puts in front of you.”
“By opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole.”
“Nothing in life worth doing is easy,”
“Some loves never die.”
American author Kristin Hannah’s historical fiction book The Nightingale was released by St. Martin’s Press in 2015. The book tells the tale of two sisters who fought to survive and oppose the German occupation of France during World War II while living in France.
Vianne Mauriac bids her husband Antoine farewell in the tranquil village of Carriveau as he departs for the Front. She doesn’t think the Nazis will take over France. However, they do invade in large numbers of marching soldiers, convoys of trucks and tanks, and planes that fill the sky and rain bombs on defenseless people. Vianne and her daughter are forced to coexist with the enemy when a German captain seizes their home. Otherwise, they risk losing everything. She is compelled to make one impossible decision after another in order to keep her family alive when they are without food, money, or hope and as danger mounts all around them.
Isabelle, Vianne’s sister, is a disobedient 18-year-old who is pursuing her sense of purpose with all the wild ardor of youth. She meets Gatan, a partisan who thinks the French can fight the Nazis from within France, while thousands of Parisians march into the unknowable terrors of war, and she falls in love as only the young can—completely. Isabelle enters the Resistance after he betrays her, never looks back, and repeatedly puts her life in danger to defend others.
Bestselling author Kristin Hannah vividly depicts the vast scope of World Struggle II while illuminating a personal aspect of history that is rarely seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale relates the story of two sisters who, in a France conquered by Germany during World War II and divided by years, experiences, ideals, and circumstances, each set out on a perilous journey in search of survival, love, and freedom.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”
“Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.”
“I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.”
“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”
“Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between.”
Texas, 1934. The Great Plains are in a drought, and millions of people are jobless. As crops fail, water runs out, and dust threatens to bury everyone, farmers are fighting to maintain their land and their means of subsistence. The Dust Bowl era, one of the worst parts of the Great Depression, has descended with a vengeance.
Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, is forced to choose between fighting for the land she loves and moving to California in quest of a better life in this uncertain and frightening period. A generation will be defined by the heroism and sacrifice of one unbreakable woman, whose book The Four Winds is an unforgettable portrayal of America and the American Dream.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”
“Courage is fear you ignore.”
“It wasn’t the fear that mattered in life. It was the choices made when you were afraid. You were brave because of your fear, not in spite of it.”
“Love is what remains when everything else is gone.”
“Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.”
Former POW Ernt Allbright returns from the Vietnam War a different and more violent person. He takes an impetuous decision to relocate his family to Alaska, where they’ll live off the net in the country’s final true frontier, after losing yet another job.
Leni, a 13-year-old girl growing up at a turbulent time and trapped in the riptide of her passionate, turbulent connection with her parents, dares to dream that moving to a new country may bring about a better future for her family. She is in dire need of a place to call home. Cora, her mother, is willing to go to any lengths for the man she adores, even if it involves pursuing him into the dark.
Alaska initially appears to be the solution to their problems. They discover a fiercely independent group of strong men and equally powerful women in a wild, distant area of the state. The Allbrights’ lack of planning and diminishing finances are made up for by the lengthy, sunny days and the kindness of the villagers.
But as winter draws near and Alaska is enveloped in darkness, Ernt’s precarious mental state worsens and the family starts to fall apart. The dangers from within will soon outweigh those from beyond. Leni and her mother discover the terrifying reality that they are on their own in their small cottage, which is covered in snow and enveloped in 18 hours of the night. In the wild, they are their only source of protection.
Kristin Hannah captures the irrepressible spirit of the contemporary American pioneer and the energy of a disappearing Alaska—a place of unparalleled beauty and danger—in this stunning depiction of human weakness and resiliency. The Great Alone is a brave, stunning, all-night-long read about love and sorrow, the struggle for existence, and the savagery that resides in both nature and man.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“A thing can be true and not the truth,”
“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
“Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.”
“Alaska isn’t about who you were when you headed this way. It’s about who you become.”
“It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”
Marie-Laure, whose father works at the Museum of Natural History, resides in Paris close by. When Marie-Laure is twelve years old, the Nazis have taken over Paris, and her father and daughter leave for Saint-Malo, a walled city where Marie-great Laure’s uncle lives alone in a tall home by the sea. They may be transporting the most priceless and hazardous treasure in the museum.
Orphan Werner Pfennig grows up in a mining village in Germany with his younger sister, fascinated by a rudimentary radio they discover that transmits news and tales from locations they have never visited or imagined. Werner gains proficiency in creating and maintaining these essential new tools and is hired to use his skill to find the resistance. Doerr skillfully illustrates the ways people attempt to be kind to one another in spite of all circumstances by weaving together the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner.
The breathtakingly beautiful, immediately successful New York Times bestseller by Anthony Doerr tells the story of a blind French girl and a German boy who cross paths in occupied France as they both struggle to survive the destruction of World War II.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
1939 in Memphis. On their family’s Mississippi River skiff, 12-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings lead fantastic lives. However, Rill is left in charge when their father has to hurry their mother to the hospital on a stormy night, up until a large group of strangers arrive. The Foss children are taken away from everything they know and placed in an orphanage run by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. They are told they will shortly be reunited with their parents, but they soon come to grips with the grim reality. Rill battles to maintain her sisters and brother together in a world of peril and uncertainty while being at the merciless mercy of the facility’s sadistic director.
Present-day Aiken, South Carolina. Avery Stafford, who was raised in affluence and privilege, appears to have it all—a distinguished profession as a federal prosecutor, a charming fiancé, and an extravagant wedding in the works. An accidental encounter, however, leaves Avery with unsettling questions and forces her to travel through her family’s long-hidden history, on a road that will eventually lead either to destruction or to atonement, when she returns home to assist her father through a health crisis.
Lisa Wingate’s gripping, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting story reminds us that even though the paths we take can lead to many different places, the heart never forgets where we belong. It is based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals, in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, abducted and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.”
“A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.”
“People don’t come into our lives by accident.”
“We plan our days, but we don’t control them.”
“A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses.”