Survivor Biography

This is the memoir written by Bella Kuligowska Zucker, the only person in her family to survive the Holocaust. In September 1939, Bella was a carefree teenager living in Poland when the German army struck. She was rounded up with her friends and family and sent to a series of grim Jewish ghettos. After loved ones were separated and lost through the war years, Bella survived by changing her identity. After finding the birth certificate of a Catholic girl five years her senior, she became Sabina Mazurek. Then she went into the eye of the storm, Germany.

From surviving a frigid night in northern Canada to munching on grubs in the Australian Outback, Les Stroud’s passion for the outdoors has driven him to some of the planet’s most remote and beautiful locations. In Wild Outside, he invites listeners into his world of wilderness adventures with fast-paced stories, nature facts, and practical advice for spending time outside.

At the age of sixteen, my life changed forever when I was sent to St Mary's asylum, in Ireland, after being falsely accused of a crime I did not commit. Abandoned by my family and friends I had to fight for survival in the asylum. Inside the asylum I worked as a slave in the laundry, I suffered persecution at the hands of the nuns and fought to survive the strict regime I was under. With the help of my friend Rose we realized we had to escape the asylum, or risk being imprisoned for the rest of our lives.Join me on my battle to becoming a Magdalene survivor, in my battle for freedom.

A story ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place. It's a memoir of families across generations of peace and of war, of homes that become lost and hopes that are kept, and a belief in a future that's better than the present. In each family, a fundamental life event spawns ripples that sweep across time and generations that would fade forever without exploration and would otherwise shed all meaning. The key event in many lives is making the decision to leave home forever and to strike out, not knowing if it leads to disaster or to a future and a better place.

Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a 16-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the "sport" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers.

Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair." It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison - one of the country’s worst - six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary and capricious, Billy was re-sentenced to life without parole.

On May 2, 1963, Robert Killins, a former United Church minister, slaughtered every woman in his family but one. She (and her brother) lived to tell the story of what motivated a talented man who had been widely admired, a scholar and graduate from Queen's University, to stalk and terrorize the women in his family for almost twenty years and then murder them. Through extensive oral histories, Cook and Carson painstakingly trace the causes of a femicide in which four women and two unborn babies were murdered over the course of one bloody evening.

Twenty-four hours: that's how long fourteen-year-old Elvira Gonzalez is given to come up with the $40,000 she needs to save her kidnapped mother from a drug cartel. It's 2006 and Elvira's hometown of Laredo, Texas, has become engulfed by the Mexican Drug War. Elvira's life is unraveling around her—setting her on a harrowing path that leads her to being locked up in one of South Texas's worst juvenile detention centers. After Elvira's released from juvie, she's resolved to never go back. That's when her unexpected salvation arrives in the form of 33-inch-high plastic hurdles.

This striking work of narrative nonfiction tells the true story of six-year-old Sachiko Yasui's survival of the Nagasaki atomic bomb on August 9, 1945 and the heartbreaking and lifelong aftermath. Having conducted extensive interviews with Sachiko Yasui, Caren Stelson shares the true story of a young girl who survived the atomic bomb and chronicles her long journey to find peace. This special book offers listeners a remarkable new perspective on the final moments of World War II and their aftermath.

The moving true story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias “Anna”) and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaust. A middle grade nonfiction novel-in-verse by award-winning author Susan Hood with Greg Dawson (Zhanna’s son).

A young Jewish mother. A Nazi occupation bent on genocide. A heart-breaking decision that will tear a young family apart. Among the Reeds is a deeply personal family memoir that is part biography, part psychological observation of the extraordinary wartime lives of a persecuted people. If you like true stories of courage, heart-stopping near misses, and tear-jerking choices, then you’ll love Tammy Bottner’s compelling account.

When Leosz was only six, his life changed completely. World War II broke out in 1939, sweeping the young boy into the whirlwind of the holocaust. For six long torturous years, Leosz sees and goes through everything: myriads of overcrowded transports headed for concentration camps, life on the streets of occupied Poland as an abandoned child, hiding from cruel Nazis, forced labor under conditions of starvation, and the constant threat of death.

What happens when a gifted writer is diagnosed with advanced colon cancer at 47 and faces the worst case scenario - a torturous uphill battle of unimaginable pain, fear, humiliation and heartache? What's the medicine of choice that's going to keep him alive? He writes. Stuart Chapin - screenwriter, director, stuntman, 80's action star, loving husband and father of two. He has a perspective like no other and a plan to beat the odds. Brutally honest, he crafts words with a relentless wit. To survive cancer, you need more than a sense of humor. You need an unending arsenal, which Stuart ...

Wondering if science could explain how he survived his 40-year avalanche of drugs and alcohol, Ozzy Osbourne became one of a handful of people in the world to have his entire DNA mapped in 2010. It was a highly complex, $65,000 process, but the results were conclusive: Ozzy is a genetic anomaly. The "Full Ozzy Genome" contained variants that scientists had never before encountered and the findings were presented at the prestigious TEDMED Conference in San Diego - making headlines around the world.

On March 21, 2022, The New York Times for the first time published excerpts from the diary of Nadiya Sukhorukova, who noted evidence of Russia's real crimes in Ukraine. "A neighbor said that God left Mariupol. He was afraid of everything he saw," Ms. Sukhorukova wrote in a series of Facebook posts posted after her escape late last week. "I am alive and now I will live long. And my city is dying a painful death," she added. "For twenty days I was dying with it. I was in hell.” (Megan Specia, The New York Times). Excerpts from the diary have been published in UK, USA, Germany, Ukraine, and ...

Set against a backdrop of East End London, Georgia experienced a childhood few of us could imagine. Though brought up in a loving family, she watched her family break apart through deceit and her mother descend into heroin addiction. Escaping into what she felt was a loving sanctuary, Georgia ended up trapped in a violent relationship with a man who would beat and abuse her. After having her three children by him, she knew she had to escape to finally find safety. Now Georgia is sharing her story of survival to help others and prove there is hope even after trauma and heartache.

Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country.

Mendel (Manny) Steinberg spent his teens in Nazi extermination camps in Germany and Poland, miraculously surviving while millions perished. This is his story. Born in 1925 in the Jewish ghetto in Radom, Poland, Manny soon realized that people of Jewish faith were increasingly being regarded as outsiders. In September 1939 the Nazis invaded, and the nightmare started. The city's Jewish population had no chance of escaping and was faced with starvation, torture, sexual abuse and ultimately deportation.

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.

The lone survivor trembled as she pleaded with investigators.... For over 40 years, the events of what happened at Gitchie Manitou the night of November 17, 1973, remained a mystery to all but a few. Then the lone survivor broke her silence. Five teenage friends had driven to the park to spend a few hours around a campfire. By morning, four had been murdered, and only she was still alive. Gitchie Girl Uncovered is a chilling account of the strange twists and bizarre details discovered by an elite team of investigators under intense pressure to catch the killers.