True Survival

She was 17 years old on a Christmas Eve flight 40 years ago to join her father for Christmas when the unimaginable happened. The Lockheed L-188A Electra, on the way from Lima to Pucallpa, flew directly into a thunderstorm. A strike of lightning left the plane incinerated and Juliane Diller (Koepcke) still strapped to her plane seat falling through the night air two miles above the Earth. Her survival is unexplainable and considered a modern-day miracle. Her mother was among the 91 dead and Juliane the sole survivor.

On August 29, 1973, a routine dive to the telecommunication cable that snakes along the Atlantic sea bed went badly wrong. Pisces III, with Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson onboard, had tried to surface when a catastrophic fault suddenly sent the mini-submarine tumbling to the ocean bed - almost half a mile below. Badly damaged, buried nose first in a bed of sand, the submarine and the two men were now trapped far beyond the depth of all previous sub-sea rescues. They had just two days’ worth of oxygen. Rescue was three days away.

“The Girl Nobody Wants” is a gripping and poignant book that delves into the harrowing reality of child abuse. Lily O’Brien, courageously shares her own tragic experiences' shedding light on the dark corners of her past. The Girl Nobody Wants is a Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland. On my 40th birthday, I stand before the mirror a mere shell of a person, waiting for life to slip away. To everyone I appear clean, tidy, and perhaps even happy, a skill I've perfected over the years. But behind my smile lies a lifetime of hidden pain. This is the raw, emotional account of an ...

In this non-fiction tale of Holocaust survival, Libe must survive for 18 months in a haystack. Her only hope comes from a dog named Brisko. Libe and her family are harbored by a farmer named Pavlo, who has nothing to gain from his display of humanity, and everything to lose - including his family. As the ghetto in Tuchin burns and the Nazis hunt them daily, Libe’s family must rely on their cunning, hope, and faith to endure. As their journey swells with danger and despair, their faith begins to wane, and Libe finds that her very survival will depend upon her miraculous hero, Brisko.

Courage finds its way into the hearts of soldiers in the heat of war. A soldier's bravery is tested on the battlefield, where life-and-death decisions are made in a split second. These true stories detail the amazing events of soldiers who were outnumbered and staring death in the face but survived.

On May 19, 1942, a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico stalked its prey 50 miles away from New Orleans. Captained by 29-year-old Iron Cross recipient Erich Würdemann, the submarine set its sights on the freighter Heredia with 59 souls onboard. Most of the crew were merchant seamen, but there were also a handful of civilians, including the Downs family, consisting of the parents, Ray Sr. and Ina; along with their two children, eight-year-old Ray Jr., nicknamed "Sonny", and 11-year-old Lucille.

Leaving behind friends, family, and life as they know it, the Wards embark on a journey into the Alaskan wilderness that will change them forever. Winds of Skilak traces a young couple’s adventurous move from the suburbs of Ohio to a remote island on ill-tempered Skilak Lake. As Sam and Bonnie adapt to a life without running water, electricity, and telephones, the unforgiving, desolate environment tests their courage early on.

In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16,000-foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, and braving jaguars, pumas, insects, and vampire bats in the jungle, the scientists barely completed their mission.

Electroshock therapy, child abuse, and modern-day slavery... just another day in Christine's life. Take a heart-wrenching yet inspiring ride through one woman's incredible journey that is so compelling that you are simultaneously trying to look away and unable to stop yourself from listening on. Christine's father is a wealthy, tyrannical man renowned in the diamond business. At the age of just five, little Christine is cast aside into a boarding school where she is ridiculed for two embarrassing problems. She grows up in a never-ending circle of traumatic experiences.

Most twelve-year-old boys are preoccupied with comics and playing with their friends. Twelve-year-old Frank Heeney, however, is about to start three years of hell at Ireland’s notorious St. Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack County Galway. St. Joseph’s is an inferno of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of the administrators. Many children, some as young as four, die from such conditions and are secretly disposed of in the surrounding wilderness. As Frank spends three years at St. Joseph’s Letterfrack and two years at St. Patrick’s children’s prison, he is...

Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children. Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing.

How do you survive when an ordinary day explodes into a battle against nature's most terrifying power? When the sky turns a malevolent green and the roar of a thousand freight trains is the last thing you hear before your world is ripped apart? Tornado: Twisted Tales invites you into the heart of fifteen unforgettable storms through a collection of gripping short stories. These aren't just tales of destruction; they are visceral accounts of human endurance, the desperate courage of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, and the unpredictable twists of fate that unfold when ...

In "The Brutal Truth Behind My Evil Father," Daniel Weclaw bares the harrowing chapters of his true-life memoir, recounting the agonizing years of abuse endured in his childhood at the hands of his father. This gripping narrative unearths the haunting effects that cast a long shadow over his formative years, leaving scars both seen and unseen. With unwavering candour, Daniel chronicles the tumultuous path he treads through the aftermath of this trauma, wrestling with the emotional turmoil that lingered. The legacy of his past cast its pall over his growth, weaving a narrative of struggle, ...

You didn’t see it clearly—but it saw you. You weren’t hurt—but you were marked. You barely made it out—but not all of you did. In this bone-chilling anthology of first-person accounts, survivors recount the moments they came face-to-face with things the world doesn’t believe in—close calls with creatures, anomalies, and impossible presences that seemed to reach out from the edge of reality… and nearly pulled them through. From the hiker who found something breathing beneath the rockslide, to the nightshift nurse who swears the elevator skipped a floor that doesn’t exist, ...

One misty evening, Jennings Michael Burch's mother, too sick to care for him, left her eight-year-old son at an orphanage with the words, "I'll be right back." She wasn't.... Shuttled through a bleak series of foster homes, orphanages, and institutions, Jennings never remained in any of them long enough to make a friend. Instead, he clung to a tattered stuffed animal named Doggie, his sole source of comfort in a frightening world. Here, in his own words, Jennings Michael Burch reveals the abuse and neglect he experienced during his lost childhood.

In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.

One bite is all it takes. From the forests of South America to suburban backyards, Medical Mysteries – Bitten uncovers 20 shocking, real-life medical cases triggered by venomous bites, infected wounds, and creatures hiding in plain sight. Discover the terrifying aftermath of tick bites that cause paralysis, mosquito-borne brain infections, and animal attacks that unleash rare, sometimes fatal diseases. What happens when a flea bite leads to a modern-day case of the plague? How does a tiny tick turn someone allergic to meat for life? Can a spider bite really rot your flesh to the bone? And...

Right under the noses of neighbors, clients, spouses, children, and friends, a secret society, simply called School—a cult of snared Manhattan professionals—has been led by the charismatic, sociopathic, and dangerous leader Sharon Gans for decades. Spencer Schneider was recruited in the eighties, and he stayed for more than twenty-three years as his life disintegrated, his self-esteem eroded, and he lined the pockets of Gans and her cult.

When Dr. Richard Greenberg, accompanied by his wife and three children, set out for a scenic day hike on the Nā Pali Coast of Kaua'i, he had little idea that the dream-like setting would soon be the backdrop of a living nightmare. With an unforeseen change in the weather, Dr. Greenberg and his family soon found themselves fighting for their lives. In this harrowing retelling of the unexpected events of that day and the journey that followed, Dr. Greenberg shares a miraculous story of disaster and rescue, of strength and faith, and of grief and recovery.

In 1839 rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would rewrite the West's understanding of human history.