Survivor Biography

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.

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.

Ruth Gruener was a hidden child during the Holocaust. At the end of the war, she and her parents were overjoyed to be free. But their struggles as displaced people had just begun. In war-ravaged Europe, they waited for paperwork for a chance to come to America. Once they arrived in Brooklyn, they began to build a new life but spoke little English. Ruth started at a new school and tried to make friends - but continued to fight nightmares and flashbacks of her time during World War II.

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.

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.

In 2003, Carolyn Jessop, a lifelong member of the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), gathered up her eight children, including her profoundly disabled four-year-old son, and escaped in the middle of the night to freedom. After detailing the shocking conditions of FLDS and her harrowing flight in her memoir, Escape, Carolyn reveled in her newfound identity as a bestselling author, a devoted mom, and a loving companion to the wonderful man in her life. She thought she had put her past firmly behind her.

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.

Erika Krouse has one of those faces. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes she has no idea what she’s doing. Then a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down.

Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and starvation. Meanwhile, Kurt made the difficult voyage, all alone, to America, to escape the war.

In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was thirty-two, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.

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.

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.

Quickly becoming a cornerstone of Holocaust historiography, this is a devastatingly stark memoir from one of the lone survivors of Treblinka. Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls - in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution.

Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a 13-year-old girl to become involved with a 50-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older.

In 2014, Chessy Prout was a freshman at St. Paul's School, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, when a senior boy sexually assaulted her as part of a ritualized game of conquest. Chessy bravely reported her assault to the police and testified against her attacker in court. Then, in the face of unexpected backlash from her once-trusted school community, she shed her anonymity to help other survivors find their voice.

Keri Blakinger always lived life at full throttle. Growing up, that meant throwing herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice. For the next nine years, Keri ricocheted from one dark place to the next: living on the streets, selling drugs and sex, and shooting up between classes all while trying to hold herself together enough to finish her degree at Cornell.

At age 19, pilot Dale Black miraculously survived an airplane crash that killed the other two pilots on board. Hovering between life and death for three days, he had a breathtaking experience of heaven. Against all odds and with insurmountable injuries, Capt. Black recovered from his injuries and returned to fly airplanes as a professional pilot. For 40 years he kept the story to himself at the urging of his grandfather to "live" his experience rather than talk about it.

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.

From Beau Wise and Tom Sileo comes Three Wise Men, an incredible memoir of family, service, and sacrifice by a marine who lost both his brothers in combat - becoming the only "sole survivor" during the war in Afghanistan.

Meet Barbara Reichmann, once known as Gucia Gomolinska: smart, determined, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. A Jew growing up in predominantly Catholic Poland during the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future. Her world is turned upside down when Nazis invade Poland and establish the first Jewish ghetto of World War II in her town of Piotrko´w Trybunalski.