Books About The Holocaust
Books About The Holocaust
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Reading books about the Holocaust and World War II, whether memoirs, historical accounts, or works of fiction, offers numerous benefits that extend far beyond the simple acquisition of knowledge. These benefits are multifaceted, influencing our understanding of history, empathy for those who suffered, and commitment to preventing future atrocities.
Understanding the Depth of Human Experience
1. Personal Narratives and Empathy: Memoirs and personal narratives of Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans provide intimate glimpses into the lived experiences of individuals. Books like "Night" by Elie Wiesel or "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank reveal the raw, personal struggles of those who endured the Holocaust. These stories foster a deep sense of empathy and personal connection, making the historical events more relatable and impactful.
2. Diverse Perspectives: Reading a variety of books on the Holocaust and WWII exposes readers to a range of perspectives, including those of survivors, soldiers, resistance fighters, and even civilians caught in the crossfire. This diversity helps build a more comprehensive understanding of the war’s multifaceted impact on different groups of people, enhancing our appreciation of history’s complexity.
Educational Benefits
1. Historical Awareness: Books about the Holocaust and WWII provide detailed accounts of the events, timelines, and key figures involved. They help readers understand the causes, progression, and consequences of the war. This knowledge is crucial for grasping the broader historical context and its lasting implications on contemporary society.
2. Critical Thinking: Engaging with historical texts encourages critical thinking. Readers are prompted to analyze and question the motivations behind historical events, the decisions of key figures, and the moral dilemmas faced by individuals. This analytical approach fosters a deeper understanding and helps develop skills that are applicable beyond historical study.
Moral and Ethical Lessons
1. Learning from the Past: The adage "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" underscores the importance of historical awareness. Reading about the Holocaust and WWII serves as a stark reminder of the consequences of hatred, intolerance, and unchecked power. By learning about these atrocities, readers can better recognize the signs of emerging dangers in the present day and take action to prevent them.
2. Promoting Tolerance and Human Rights: Books that detail the horrors of the Holocaust and WWII highlight the devastating effects of discrimination and bigotry. These narratives promote values of tolerance, diversity, and human rights. They serve as powerful tools in educating new generations about the importance of standing against injustice and protecting the rights and dignity of all individuals.
Emotional and Psychological Growth
1. Resilience and Hope: Many accounts of the Holocaust and WWII emphasize themes of resilience, hope, and the indomitable human spirit. Stories of survival, resistance, and recovery can be incredibly inspiring, providing readers with examples of how individuals can overcome extreme adversity and maintain their humanity.
2. Emotional Processing: For descendants of Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans, reading about these events can be a form of emotional processing and healing. These books can help individuals understand their family histories, connect with the experiences of their ancestors, and find meaning in their own lives.
Cultural and Societal Impact
1. Preserving Memory: Books about the Holocaust and WWII play a critical role in preserving the memory of those who suffered and perished. They ensure that future generations remain aware of these historical events and the lessons they impart. This preservation is vital for maintaining a collective memory that honors the victims and acknowledges the past.
2. Influencing Public Discourse: Literature about the Holocaust and WWII can influence public discourse by highlighting the importance of historical awareness and ethical responsibility. These books often contribute to discussions on policy, education, and social justice, encouraging societies to strive for a more just and humane world.
Reading books about the Holocaust and WWII is not merely an academic exercise; it is a profound journey into the depths of human history and experience. These books educate, inspire, and challenge readers to reflect on the past and its relevance to the present and future. By engaging with these narratives, we not only honor the memories of those who suffered but also equip ourselves with the knowledge and empathy needed to build a better, more compassionate world.
20 Books About The Holocaust, Survivors, and WWII
Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Anna Salton Eisen
As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen breaks the silence that was intended as a protective shield against the unspeakable past in her new memoir, PILLAR OF SALT: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Mandel Vilar Press Trade Paperback Original; April 26, 2022; $19.95). A new voice in Holocaust literature, Anna begins this heart-wrenching memoir as she looks back to her own youth when she discovers two
hidden watercolor paintings depicting the horrors of the Holocaust and sets out to uncover the truth of her father’s past. Her quest leads her on a journey to unlock a history sealed in silence and buried by time. With her father as her guide, she travels through the picturesque Polish countryside pockmarked by the remnants of former concentration camps and sites of desolate Holocaust memorials. Together with her family, they return to the ghetto where her
father’s imprisonment in ten concentration camps over three years began. They also find their way back to his boyhood town and into his childhood home where painful memories exist, but strangers now live. Through her keen observations and open heart, Anna combines the meticulous work of an archaeologist with the compassionate perspective of a daughter.
The Teacher of Warsaw by Mario Escobar
This unforgettable and devastating story was inspired by real-life hero of the Holocaust, Janusz Korczak, and reminds the world that even one single person can create meaning, hope, and love. Wonderful for fans of The Warsaw Orphan and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Running For Shelter by Suzette Sheft
Suzette Sheft, now a 16-year-old high school student, grew up hearing the horrific stories of her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust—the Nazis kicking down her door, the anguished separation from her mother in Vienna, the years of fear and dislocation, staying one step ahead of capture and deportation to a concentration camp. When Suzette read a 2020 survey that most young Americans did not know how many Jews were killed by the Germans, and many had never even heard the term Holocaust, she was shocked—and determined to try to change it. The result is RUNNING FOR SHELTER: A TRUE STORY, a young adult novel based on her grandmother Inge Eisenger's harrowing experiences during WWII. The book conjures what it felt like for a young person to live through this ghastly time: the terror, confusion, and world-shattering loss. It’s about a teen, written by a teen, for teens and other young readers who may not have had a Holocaust survivor in their family passing on the stories, making sure they never forget.
Unearthed: A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Meryl Frank
As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed.
Unearthed is the story of Meryl’s search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin—her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl’s search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?
Summons to Berlin: Nazi Theft and a Daughter's Quest for Justice by Joanne Intrator
On his deathbed, Dr. Joanne Intrator's father poses two unsettling questions:
"Are you tough enough? Do they know who you are?"
Joanne soon realizes that these haunting questions relate to a center-city Berlin building at 16 Wallstrasse that the Nazis ripped away from her family in 1938. But a decade is to pass before she will fully come to grasp why her father threw down the gauntlet as he did.
Repeatedly, Joanne's restitution quest brings her into confrontation with yet another of her profound fears surrounding Germany and the Holocaust. Having to call on reserves of strength she's unsure she possesses, the author leans into her professional command of psychiatry, often overcoming flabbergasting obstacles perniciously dumped in her path.
The depth and lucidity of psychological insight threaded throughout Summons to Berlin makes it an attention-grabbing standout among books on like topics. As a reader, you'll come away delighted to know just who Dr. Joanne Intrator is. You'll also finish the book cheering for her, because in the end, she proves far more than tough enough to satisfy her father's unnerving final demands.
The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman
A billionaire Holocaust survivor hires a writer to uncover the truth of Salvador Allende’s death, and they must confront their own dark histories to find a path forward—for themselves and for our ravaged planet.
An expansive, engrossing mystery for fans of Isabel Allende, Jeff VanderMeer, and Bill McKibben, from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden.
Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude toward the late Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington DC and New York, to Santiago and Valparaíso, and finally to London. They encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: a wedding photographer who can predict a couple’s future; a policeman in pursuit of the serial killer targeting refugees; a revolutionary caught trying to assassinate a dictator; and, above all, the complex women who support them along the way, for their own obscure reasons.
Before Ariel and Joseph can resolve a quest full of dangers and enigmas, they must help each other come to terms with guilt and trauma from personal catastrophes hidden deep in the past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about love, family, machismo, fascism, and exile that asks what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre, expanding it in an unsuspected and exceptional way.
Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger
Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life.
After moving away to escape the “cloying exile’s nostalgia,” Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage.
Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
Dwell Time is an immigrant’s story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one’s heart to another person’s wounds.
Run and Hide by Don Brown
In the tightening grip of Hitler’s power, towns, cities, and ghettoes were emptied of Jews. Unless they could escape, Jewish children would not be spared their deadly fate in the Holocaust, a tragedy of unfathomable depth. Only 11% of the Jewish children living in Europe before 1939 survived the Second World War.
Run and Hide tells the stories of these children, forced to leave their homes and families, as they escaped certain horror. Some children flee to England by train. Others are hidden from Nazis, sometimes in plain sight. Some are secreted away in attics and farmhouses. Still others make miraculous escapes, cresting over the snow-covered Pyrenees mountains to safety.
Acclaimed nonfiction storyteller Don Brown brings his expertise for journalistic reporting to the deeply felt personal narratives of Jewish children who survived against overwhelming odds.
The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from antisemitism, but now, seven years later, being a Jew has become increasingly dangerous, even in their beloved home of Czernowitz, long considered a safe haven for Jewish people. And when Astra falls in love and starts pulling away from her, Rieke wonders if there’s anything in her life she can count on—and, if so, if she has the power to hold on to it.
Then—war breaks out in Europe. First the Russians, then the Germans, invade Czernowitz. Almost overnight, Rieke and Astra’s world changes, and every day becomes a struggle: to keep their grandfather’s business, to keep their home, to keep their lives. Rieke has long known that she exists in a world defined by those who have power and those who do not, and as those powers close in around her, she must decide whether holding on to her life might mean letting go of everything that has ever mattered to her—and if that’s a choice she will even have the chance to make.
Based on the true experiences of her grandmother’s childhood in Holocaust-era Romania, award-winning author Elana K. Arnold weaves an unforgettable tale of love and loss in the darkest days of the twentieth century—and one young woman’s will to survive them.
Fervor by Toby Lloyd
Hannah and Eric Rosenthal are devout Jews living in North London with their three children and Eric's father Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. Both intellectually gifted and deeply unconventional, the Rosenthals believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament and in the presence of God (and evil) in daily life. As Hannah prepares to publish a sensationalist account of Yosef's years in war-torn Europe—unearthing a terrible secret from his time in the camps—Elsie, her perfect daughter, starts to come undone. And then, in the wake of Yosef’s death, she disappears. When she returns, just as mysteriously as she left, she is altered in disturbing ways.
Witnessing the complete transformation of her daughter, Hannah begins to suspect that Elsie has delved too deep into the labyrinths of Jewish mysticism and gotten lost among shadows. But for Elsie's brother Tovyah, a brilliant but reclusive student struggling to find his place at Oxford, the truth is much simpler: his sister is the product of a dysfunctional family, obsessed with empty rituals, traditions, and unbridled ambition. But who is right? Is religion the cure for the disease or the disease itself? And how can they stop the darkness from engulfing Elsie completely?
Alive with both the bristling energy of a great campus novel and the unsettling, ever-shifting ground of a great horror tale, Fervor is at its heart a family story—where personal allegiances compete with obligations to history and to mysterious forces that offer both consolation and devastation.
All for You: A World War II Family Memoir of Love, Separation, and Loss by Dena Rueb Romero
Emil, a Jewish man in 1930s Germany, loves Deta, a Lutheran, but Nazi racial purity laws forbid their marriage. Desperate to find a place where their love can survive, they must separate to get away. Deta leaves for England, but Emil has to overcome red tape, resistance from his aging parents, and his own ambivalence before he can embark for America. With only telegrams and letters from Deta to sustain him, he does all he can to bring her and his family to America. But the clock is ticking as the war breaks out and the Nazis tighten their stranglehold.
From the heartbreaking news of November 10, 1938 (Kristallnacht) to the horrific revelations after the German surrender in 1945, Emil’s story runs the course of the war. Can he make his way in this new world? Will he be reunited with his beloved Deta? And will he ever see his family again?
Told by Emil’s daughter with the help of letters and historical documents, All for You is a true story about love overcoming despair and the impact the Holocaust continues to have on the rising generation.
But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found in a Hearing World by Claudia Marseille
By age four, Claudia Marseille had hardly uttered a word. When her parents finally had her hearing tested and learned she had a severe hearing loss, they chose to mainstream her, hoping this would offer her the most “normal” childhood possible. With the help of a primitive hearing aid, Claudia worked hard to learn to hear, lipread, and speak even as she tried to hide her disability in order to fit in. As a result, she was often misunderstood, lonely, and isolated—fitting into neither the hearing world nor the Deaf culture.
This memoir explores Claudia’s relationships with her German refugee parents—a disturbed, psychoanalyst father obsessed over various harebrained projects and moneymaking schemes and a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in Munich—and with her own identity. Claudia shares how she emerged from loneliness and social isolation, explored her Jewish identity, struggled to find a career compatible with hearing loss, and eventually opened herself to a life of creativity and love.
But You Look So Normal is the inspiring story of a life affected but not defined by an invisible disability. It is a journey through family, loss, shame, identity, love, and healing as Claudia finally, joyfully, finds her place in the world.
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.
Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
Klara's Truth by Susan Weissbach Friedman
It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine, a contained person living a contained life—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, that will dramatically change her life. Her father, she learns—the man who has been absent from her life for the last forty-three years, and about whom she has long been desperate for information—is dead. Has been for many years, in fact, which Bessie clearly knew. But now the Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, and Bessie wants the money. Klara has little interest in the money—but she does want answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more.
In Poland, Klara begins to piece together her father’s, and her own, story. She also connects with extended family, begins a romantic relationship, and discovers her calling: repairing the hundreds of forgotten, and mostly destroyed, pre-War Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Along the way, she becomes a more integrated, embodied, and interpersonally connected individual—one with the tools to make peace with her past and, for the first time in her life, build purposefully toward a bigger future.
The British Booksellers by Kristy Cambron
A tenant farmer’s son had no business daring to dream of a future with an earl’s daughter, but that couldn’t keep Amos Darby from his secret friendship with Charlotte Terrington . . . until the reality of the Great War sobered youthful dreams. Now decades later, he bears the brutal scars of battles fought in the trenches and their futures that were stolen away. His return home doesn’t come with tender reunions, but with the hollow fulfillment of opening a bookshop on his own and retreating as a recluse within its walls.
When the future Earl of Harcourt chose Charlotte to be his wife, she knew she was destined for a loveless match. Though her heart had chosen another long ago, she pledges her future even as her husband goes to war. Twenty-five years later, Charlotte remains a war widow who divides her days between her late husband’s declining estate and operating a quaint Coventry bookshop—Eden Books, lovingly named after her grown daughter. And Amos is nothing more than the rival bookseller across the lane.
As war with Hitler looms, Eden is determined to preserve her father’s legacy. So when an American solicitor arrives threatening a lawsuit that could destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to preserve, mother and daughter prepare to fight back. But with devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe’s local blitz terrorizing the skies, battling bookshops—and lost loves, Amos and Charlotte—must put aside their differences and fight together to help Coventry survive.
From deep in the trenches of the Great War to the storied English countryside and the devastating Coventry Blitz of WWII, The British Booksellers explores the unbreakable bonds that unite us through love, loss, and the enduring solace that can be found between the pages of a book.
Kate's War by Linda Stewart Henley
Set in a London suburb during the first year of WWII, and inspired by a little-known event from 1940 in which the author’s father participated, KATE'S WAR tells the story of a young teacher and her family facing the dangers of war, especially when sheltering one of her pupils, a Jewish German refugee. This poignant and gripping tale of bravery and hope will appeal to fans of WWII novels like The Paris Library, The Nightingale, and Beneath A Scarlet Sky, in which ordinary people do extraordinary things.
Lady Codebreaker by K.D. Alden
Fans of Kate Quinn and Kristina McMorris will love this gripping historical novel based on the true story of the woman who used her codebreaking skills to bring down Prohibition gangsters and WWII Nazis, and who ultimately helped found the present-day CIA.
Grace Smith has never been one to conform to society’s expectations. She flees small-town Indiana to seek adventure—and finds more than she bargained for when she’s hired by an eccentric millionaire to learn codebreaking. Soon she’s using those skills to help head the government’s fledgling cryptanalysis unit.
During Prohibition, Grace takes up the fight against rumrunners—not to mention Al Capone himself. And as the country careens from one Great War to another, it’s Grace who must crack the secrets of foreign governments, catch spies, and derail saboteurs . . . before it’s too late.
With wry wit and sheer grit, she forges her own path as a codebreaker, wife, mother. She’s spent a lifetime going up against powerful men and winning. But as war rages and the stakes grow impossibly high, Grace faces a truly impossible choice: her family or her country?
The Underground Library by Jennifer Ryan
Drawing from the true story of the Bethnal Green Library in London—whose collection was largely moved underground into Tube stations for those taking shelter during the Blitz in WWII—Ryan tells the story of three young women who must use their fighting spirit to save the community’s beloved library.
When new deputy librarian, Juliet Lansdown, finds that Bethnal Green Library isn't the bustling hub she's expecting, she becomes determined to breathe life back into it and show the men in charge that a woman is up to the task of running it. Katie Upwood is thrilled to be working at the library before she heads off to university in the fall, but after the death of her beau on the front line and amid tumultuous family strife, she finds herself harboring a life-changing secret with no one to turn to for help. Sofie Baumann, a young Jewish refugee, came to London on a domestic service visa only to be treated abominably by her employer. She escapes to the library every chance she can, finding friendship and aid in searching for her sister, who is still trying to flee occupied Europe.
After a slew of bombs destroys the library, Juliet relocates the stacks to the local Underground station where the city's residents shelter nightly, determined to lend out stories that will keep spirits up. But tragedy after tragedy threatens to unmoor the women and sever the ties of their community. Will Juliet, Kate, and Sofie be able to overcome their own troubles to save the library? Or will the beating heart of their neighborhood be lost forever?
The Woman With a Purple Heart by Diane Hanks
"Historical fiction at its finest!" —Amanda Skenandore, author of The Second Life of Mirielle West and The Nurse's Secret
Based on the real life of Lieutenant Annie Fox, Chief Nurse of Hickam Hospital, The Woman with a Purple Heart is an inspiring WWII novel of heroic leadership, courage, and friendship that also exposes a shocking and shameful side of history.
Annie Fox will stop at nothing to serve her country. But what happens when her country fails her?
In November 1941, Annie Fox, an Army nurse, is transferred to Hickam Field, an air force base in Honolulu. The others on her transport plane are thrilled to work in paradise, but Annie sees her new duty station as the Army’s way of holding the door open to her retirement. But serving her country is her calling and she will go wherever she is told.
On December 7, Annie’s on her way to work when the first Japanese Zero fighter plane flies low over Hickam’s Parade Ground. The death and destruction that follow leave her no time to process what’s happening. She rallies her nurses, and they work to save as many lives as they can. But soon their small hospital is overwhelmed. Annie drives into Honolulu to gather supplies, nurses, and several women who will donate blood. However, the nurses are Japanese Americans, and the blood donors are prostitutes.
Under Annie’s leadership and working together in unexpected ways, they make it through that horrific day, when one of the Japanese American nurses and Annie’s friend, Kay, is arrested as a suspected subversive. As Hickam tries to recover, Annie works to find her friend and return Kay to her family. But Annie’s love for her country is put to the test. How can she reconcile the American bravery and resilience she saw on December 7 with the prejudice and injustice she witnesses just a few months later?
Praise for The Woman with a Purple Heart:
"Vividly portrays a little-known story in a well-known time on a day that will live in infamy. A stirring read!" —Erika Robuck, national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman
"A wonderful tribute to a true American hero." —Sara Ackerman, USA Today bestselling author of Radar Girls and The Codebreaker's Secret
"Fast-paced and immersive. This is the kind of story that sticks with you long after turning the final page." —Elise Hooper, author of Angels of the Pacific
Women of the Post by Joshunda Sanders
For fans of A League of Their Own, a debut historical novel that gives voice to the pioneering Black women of the of the Six Triple Eight Battalion who made history by sorting over one million pieces of mail overseas for the US Army.
1944, New York City. Judy Washington is tired of working from dawn ‘til dusk in the Bronx Slave Market, cleaning white women’s houses and barely making a dime. Her husband is fighting overseas, so it's up to Judy and her mother to make enough money for rent and food. When the chance arises for Judy to join the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and the ability to bring home a steady paycheck, she jumps at the opportunity.
Immediately upon arrival, Judy undergoes grueling military drills and inspections led by Second Officer Charity Adams, one of the only Black officers in the WAC who has a secret relationship with one of the other women officers. Yet just as quickly as she arrived, Judy and her newfound friends Stacy, Bernadette, and Mary Alyce are transferred to Birmingham, England as part of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion—the only unit of Black women to serve overseas in WWII. Here, they are assigned the mission to sort a backlog of over one million pieces of mail to troops who marched on Normandy.
The women work tirelessly, knowing that they're reuniting soldiers to their loved ones through the letters they write. Meanwhile, their fearless leader, Officer Charity Adams, advocates for better work conditions and hours. However, their work becomes personal when Mary Alyce discovers a backlogged letter addressed to Judy that will upend her personal life. As life-changing findings and unexpected romances arise, will the group of women fail the daunting task ahead of them, or will they succeed?
Told through the alternating perspectives of Judy, Charity, and Mary Alyce, Women of the Post is an unforgettable story of perseverance, female friendship, romance, and self-discovery.
