The Best Books About Resistance & Rescue

Corrie ten Boom · 1971 · 241 pages

The rescuer's perspective on the Holocaust — and a testament of faith under persecution that has never been out of print.

Hampton Sides · 2001 · 342 pages

Reads like a thriller. Sides intercuts the rescue operation with the prisoners' harrowing three-year ordeal. One of the most.

Thomas Keneally · 1982 · 400 pages

Booker Prize winner built entirely from survivor testimony. The rare book that asks why a bad man did a great thing — and refuses to fully answer.

Lois Lowry · 1989 · 137 pages

The Newbery-winning introduction to the Holocaust for generations of children — built on the true story of Denmark saving almost its entire Jewish population.

Walter Lord · 1982 · 323 pages

Lord's signature interview-driven method applied to the evacuation — soldiers, sailors, civilians, and Germans, hour by hour on the beaches.

Kristin Hannah · 2015 · 440 pages

The biggest WWII fiction phenomenon of its decade, with millions of readers. Occupied France and the women's war, built on the real escape lines.

Leon Uris · 1961 · 539 pages

The fighting Jews of Warsaw given the epic treatment — forty days of revolt against the SS with almost no weapons. Uris at his page-turning best.

Sarah Rose · 2019 · 384 pages

Churchill's secret army of women — saboteurs, couriers, and radio operators with six-week life expectancies — restored to the D-Day story.

Mark Sullivan · 2017 · 524 pages

Based on the unbelievable true story of Pino Lella, untold for seventy years. Millions of copies sold; the Italian war's biggest modern phenomenon.

Mitchell Zuckoff · 2011 · 384 pages

The strangest true rescue story of the war, reconstructed from the survivors' diaries and the valley people's own memories of the sky visitors.

Diane Ackerman · 2007 · 368 pages

A true rescue story built from Antonina Żabińska's diary — the Holocaust resisted with cunning, animals, and nerve.