Survivor Biography

When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish American soldier gave her a banknote on which he’d written ‘Good luck and happiness’. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz, she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.

Louis and Jenni Böhm were a middle-class Jewish couple who established a thriving business and raised a family in a small country town in Upper Silesia in 1885. The book follows the fortunes of the family over a period of 70 years, during which their peaceful and prosperous existence is gradually eroded as they are forced to suffer increasing humiliation and ostracisation under the Nazi regime imposed on pre-war Germany by Adolf Hitler.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Mira was only 12 years old when World War II broke out and 17 when the Nazis finally caught up with her. Torn apart from her family, she went on to survive four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and a Death March when she was too weak to walk. She lived when almost everyone she knew did not. At 88, living in Australia, Mira is diagnosed with cancer and her daughter, a journalist, decides to interview her to distract her from her illness.

“Discharged from a hospital just means you’re not dead.” These words of Ralph B. Lilly, M.D., describe his early struggle to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Lilly was a forty-four-year-old practicing neurologist sitting on his motorcycle at a red light when a drunk driver rear-ended him in 1980. In the ICU, after regaining consciousness and being told what happened, he asked, “What’s a hospital? What’s a motorcycle?” This tragic experience transformed his life and his approach to his neurology practice: doctors treat those with brain injury; but loved ones heal them.

After a 25-year career spent fighting for women's rights around the globe at the expense of time with her family, Karen Sherman looked around and realized she didn't really know her children and felt little connection to her husband. With her world - work, marriage, family - crashing down, she made the rash decision to move to Rwanda with her three sons, an experiment she dubbed "our year of living dangerously".

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they'd be working at a shoe factory. At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of the accommodation blocks, camp administration and workforces, they could both reduce the number of guards required and deflect the distrust of the prisoner population away from themselves.

Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel and Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret. Strangers to each other, they were newly pregnant and facing an uncertain fate without their husbands. Alone, scared and with so many loved ones already lost to the Nazis, these young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left: their lives and those of their unborn babies.

Was it My Fault? is intended to offer solace and guidance to those ensnared in toxic relationships, dispelling the notion that abuse is solely physical. Inspiring self-discovery, healing, and empowerment, Alana offers a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a rallying cry for survivors to reclaim their narrative—urging them not just to survive, but to thrive.

What would you do if it happened to you? If you awoke one day when you were twelve years old to be informed that your life was suddenly over? Well . . . Here is what I did. If you became the wealthiest person you would ever know just three and a half years later? What would that be like? Well, this is what it was like when it happened to me.

Sala Lewis, who at age 10 was left alone to wander the streets of Poland after her family was taken away by the Nazis. She had been out with her friends and came home to find her family gone and the apartment where she lived closed off and she was not allowed in. Everything she possessed was no longer hers. She had no family, no clothes, no food, and at that moment in time, no future. It was because she was strong willed and confident that she made her way to find her sister who had been taken to a concentration camp.

Jason Sommer's father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing this loss, Jason vividly recalls the trip to Eastern Europe the two took together in 2001.

How would you feel one day if you woke up and you were feeling good, healthy, and vibrant, ready to take on the world with all that is within you? Before you know it, all that seems to change when your body starts to shut down and you are diagnosed with a disease you never heard of or don't know anything about. How would you cope with that major life change mentally and physically? Would you give up or would you fight to survive? This story is about a 32-year journey living from the past to the present with the devastating disease of multiple sclerosis.

After a year-long battle with Stage-4C Colon Cancer, 48-year-old Lisa finally heard the words she had been hoping for: no visible sign of disease. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments were over, she was technically disease free, and it was time to celebrate that success. She never expected how difficult it would be to transition from colon cancer patient to colon cancer survivor.

Follow the winding path of a Jewish refugee turned US Army interrogator who ends up processing Nazi scientists during WWII. Fred Michel was a teenager when he escaped Nazi Germany with his family. When war broke out, he was drafted and trained at Camp Ritchie, a high level intelligence center. He ended up at an obscure fort along the Potomac River known only as P.O. Box 1142.

For 20 years Mandy had coached her clients through the turbulent waters of business and life. What she didn’t know was how important these skills would be in saving herself. On February 7, 2016, she suffered a brutal attack on her life when a college senior broke into her home in a drug-induced rage and nearly beat her to death. In this book she shares details of the attack and her journey through healing - both for herself and the man who attacked her.

On August 6, 1993, twenty-year-old Natasha Alexenko was assaulted at gunpoint. After nearly a decade, her backlogged rape kit was finally tested and her rapist, who roamed free for ten years, was brought to justice. On the day he was sentenced, Alexenko vowed that she would no longer be a statistic and would do whatever she could to help police on behalf of other rape victims. In 2011, she founded Natasha’s Justice Project (NJP), a nonprofit committed to ending the rape-kit backlog. This unflinching memoir chronicles her journey from trauma to triumph.

Imagine having your innocence stolen at an early age by someone you trust, or struggling financially before even knowing the meaning of the word “struggling.” Ebony Canion has had her share of tumultuous events, yet even she was stunned when a speeding car hit her intentionally, dragging her through the streets with her body folded underneath the vehicle. In a coma for nearly two months, Ebony had no idea her tongue and face had to be sewn back on, or the list of thirty other life-threatening injuries she had sustained. Ebony didn’t know she’d been Left for Dead.

In this intimate and insightful audiobook, Melissa Doyle shares the stories of some of the most resilient people she has ever met, gently drawing out their wisdom, empathy and heartfelt practical advice for anyone who’s going through a difficult time. When the world stopped turning in 2020, award-winning journalist Melissa Doyle had already been thrown off course by life. She’d just turned 50, her eldest child had finally left home to study overseas and her 25-year-long career as a popular presenter at Channel 7 had come to an end.

In this inspiring memoir, Emily Falcon chronicles her lifelong journey with a congenital cardiac condition. In 1982, at seven weeks old, she had a heart attack that destroyed 40 percent of the left side of her heart. This was her entry into a world of multiple cardiac procedures, surgeries, hospitalizations, and a later diagnosis of glaucoma. Balancing these serious conditions defined her life.

Corey White was a golden child. He knew this because his father would hit his mother and his sisters but not him. And his mother adored him so much she let him drop out of primary school. After losing his father to jail and his mother to heroin, though, he became a target for cruelty and dysfunction in foster homes. A scholarship to a prestigious boarding school lifted him out of foster care and awakened a love of learning and reading for him, but this was soon overwhelmed by a crushing depression and drug addiction.