The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

August 2, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Vintage, 2013. Originally published 2012. 299 pgs. Purchased. In 1915, Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Aleppo, Syria to help deliver food and medical aid to Armenian refugees. Women and children reach the city center in horrific condition, having been force marched across the desert without adequate food and water. Their husbands, fathers, and adult sons were accused of being traitors to the Ottoman Empire and killed in what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. Only […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Fiction, Genocide, Middle East • Tags: Chris Bohjalian

This Place Holds No Fear by Monika Held

July 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the German by Anne Posten. Haus Publishing, 2015. Originally published 2013. 272 pgs. Purchased.  In 1964, a Viennese man named Heiner is called to Frankfurt to testify at the war crimes trial of former SS officials and guards from Auschwitz. Heiner was deported to Auschwitz in April 1942 for his membership in the Austrian Communist Party, and his testimony about typing death records in the prisoner’s infirmary is crucial to the prosecutor’s case. As […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, German, Germany, Holocaust, Poland, Translated • Tags: Monika Held

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Delija Valiukenas

Mischling by Affinity Konar

April 8, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Lee Boudreaux Books, 2016. 344 pgs. Purchased. In 1944, twelve-year-old twin sisters named Pearl and Stasha Zagorski are deported to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. Desperate to save them, their mother seizes on the sight of triplets being led away from the cattle cars by a doctor in a white lab coat, dragging the girls out from under their grandfather’s coat and presenting them to the first guard she sees. Their mother doesn’t know – she […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Holocaust, Poland • Tags: Affinity Konar

Last Train to Istanbul by Ayşe Kulin

March 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Turkish by John W. Baker. AmazonCrossing, 2013. Originally published 2002. 395 pgs. Free download. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Selva married Rafael Alfandari, a Jewish man whose family settled in Turkey after being expelled from Spain in 1492. Neither the Alfandari family nor Selva’s parents, Fazil Resat Paşa and Leman Hanim, support the marriage and, after being cutoff, Selva and Rafael flee to Paris in the hopes of finding a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, Genocide, Holocaust, Middle East, ReadDiverse, Translated, Turkish • Tags: Ayşe Kulin

Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman

February 6, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Princeton University Press, 2017. 224 pgs. Library.  The title of Whitman’s book is bold, and it immediately caught my attention while browsing the shelves at a local bookstore. It was hard to pass over a book with the subtitle “The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”, and I only managed to put it back on the shelf after assuring myself that the local public library had a copy available. The Holocaust professors I had […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Germany, Holocaust, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: James Q. Whitman

The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

October 16, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. Vintage International, 1989. Originally published 1986. 203 pgs. Purchased. In Levi’s last book before his death, he sets out to examine the concepts of forgiveness, guilt, and memory in the context of his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz. He includes replies to his memoir from Germans, who struggle with how they should feel in light of what their parents did, and his reaction to children and adults from around […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Holocaust, Italian, Italy, Nonfiction, Poland, Translated • Tags: Primo Levi

Edith’s Story by Edith Velmans

August 12, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Bantum, 2001. Originally published 1998. 256 pgs. Gift from my mom. Subtitled “The True Story of a Young Girl’s Courage and Survival During World War II”, Velmans’ story begins in the 1950s with the birth of her twin daughters at a hospital in the Netherlands. She shares her hospital room with Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and returned Anne’s diary to her father at the end of the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Genocide, Holocaust, Nonfiction • Tags: Edith Velmans

Poland by James A. Michener

September 18, 2017 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Random House, 2014. Originally published 1983. 688 pgs. Library copy. Covering eight centuries of Polish history, Michener’s novel begins in the then-present day of 1981 with a sit down between the fictional Minister of Agriculture of communist Poland, Szymon Bukowski, and the leader of the farmers, Janko Buk, who are operating same vain as the Solidarity movement occurring in Gdansk. Bukowski and Buk come to realize their family history — and, in fact, the history of Poland […]

Categories: 2017 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Holocaust, Poland • Tags: James A. Michener

Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally

January 13, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — print. Touchstone, 1993. Originally published 1982. 400 pgs. Purchased. Winner of the 1982 Man Booker Prize and adapted into a film in 1993 produced by Steven Spielberg, Keneally’s novel recounts the efforts of Oskar Schindler, a Czechoslovakia-born German who saved over 1,100 Jewish workers from the Nazi concentration camps by employing them in his factory in Krakow, Poland. As a member of the Nazi Party and an ethnic German from Hitler’s prized Sudetenland, Schindler had the credentials necessary […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Genocide, Holocaust, Poland • Tags: Thomas Keneally

The Bone Woman by Clea Koff

December 11, 2015 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Random House, 2005. Originally published 2001. 304 pgs. PaperBackSwap. In order to prosecute perpetrators for genocide and crimes against humanity, bodies must be exhumed and their condition as well as the mass graves they are found in must be documented. It is not enough to say people of particular ethnic or religious groups have disappeared and are presumed dead as perpetrators can claim these missing individuals were casualties of war or are undocumented refugees in neighboring lands. […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Africa, Balkans, Europe, Genocide, Nonfiction • Tags: Clea Koff

Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano

April 8, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Yale University Press, 2014. 213 pgs. Library copy. Like many who read solely in English, the announcement that Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature left me a bit confounded. I have never heard of the author and never, to my recollection, seen a review for his work on one of the many book blogs I religiously read. Journalists and bloggers alike blamed the lack of awareness for his […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, French, Genocide, Holocaust, Nobel Prize, Short Stories, Translated • Tags: Patrick Modiano