Survivor Biography

In this captivating audiobook on resilience, Ria walks you through her own horrific story of more than seven years of sexual abuse by her father. She then shares how she learned not only to survive, but also to thrive in spite of her past. Learn how to overcome challenges, obstacles, and adversity in your own life by building a bridge out of the past and into the future.

“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.

I'll have to be autobiographical, but follow me if you will into Auschwitz and spend a day there, and meet some of the people in the nameless mass of bodies. Try, if you will, to feel, even for a moment, that you could have been one of them, that in fact you were one of them

For more than 30 years, Phillip Maisel has worked selflessly to record the harrowing stories of Holocaust survivors. Volunteering at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre, Phillip has listened tirelessly to their memories, preserved their voices and proven, time and time again, just how healing storytelling can be. Each testimony of survival is a miracle in itself - earning Phillip the nickname 'the Keeper of Miracles'.

Hope Through Cancer is a unique book about a cancer survivor's journey with hope. Faith, my wife, has ovarian cancer. She can close her eyes and see a mental image of a path, calm waters, shade, light, and hope. We turned this into an official painting about her journey that she mentally envisioned and was created by me. The painting is an artist's perception of a survivor's journey with hope in the light of Psalm 23. She has found the 23rd psalm to be in harmony with each aspect of her journey finding a new life, having settled fear about death.

Atta Ahmad was determined to make his dreams come true. So unwavering, in fact, that he was willing to forgo sleep just to reach his goals. Eventually, it caught up to him on September 5, 2015. That fateful day, an exhilarating road trip from Boston to Michigan turned into a fight for his life when his exhaustion drove him to fall asleep at the wheel.

The sound of snapping twigs closed in on the five teenagers enjoying an evening around a glowing campfire at Gitchie Manitou State Park. The night of music and laughter had taken a dark turn. Evil loomed just beyond the tree line, and before the night was over, one of the Midwest's most horrific mass murders had left its bloodstains spewed across the campsite. One managed to survive and would come to be known as the "Gitchie Girl".

There was a place far worse than Changi - Singapore's Outram Road Gaol. Deprivation here was so extreme that there really was a fate worse than death. Stubborn Buggers is the story of 12 Australian POWs who fought and survived the battle for Malaya, then captivity and slave labour, followed by the unimaginable hardships of Outram Road Gaol.

It is a story of how they dealt with the brutality of the Japanese military police, the feared Kempeitai.

Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams. 12-year-old David Karmi found himself face to face with the ultimate test. With his homeland consumed by fear, David entered a world of human slaughter. Whole towns were vaporized. Cities obliterated in firestorms. More than 50 million people died - 12 million either gassed, shot, hanged, worked to death, or subjected to biological experiments. David survived.

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.

The life story of a Holocaust survivor: his prewar childhood in Czechoslovakia, his experiences in eight Nazi concentration camps, his liberation and emigration to the US, and his career as a General Motors engineer, a Christian minister, and a consummate teacher. For Walter Ziffer, who today considers himself a Jewish secular humanist, life has always been a search for meaning. His compelling and insightful memoir distills the experiences of a remarkable man.

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.

When Laura Jensen Walker was diagnosed with breast cancer on her first wedding anniversary, she found humor to be healing in the midst of terrifying circumstances. In this energetic and hope-filled book, she draws on her faith and her sense of humor to encourage others going through the same thing. From discovering that "bald is beautiful" to navigating the world of saline breast implants, Walker recounts the highs and lows of coping with cancer.

Sexual abuse by her father from the time she was four until she left home at 17. Then marriage to a brutal husband who raped and beat her. Another secret. This is the story of Sarah's journey to forgiveness of self and her perpetrators to self-love and self-realization, a long and arduous process.

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.

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.

Vierzig Jahre danach erinnert sich ein in Polen aufgewachsener Jude an die Jahre der Verfolgung. Er beschreibt das Leben in Radzyn, einer typisch jüdischen Stetl-Gemeinschaft im damaligen polnischen Generalgouvernement, dem Vorhof von Treblinka, Majdanek und Auschwitz, und dann den Untergang dieser Welt, wie er ihn, gerade 17 geworden, erlebt hat: mit zunehmenden Schikanen, ständiger Bedrohung, Grausamkeiten und nackter Gewalt; mit der Verschleppung und Ermordung der Geschwister, Eltern, Freunde; mit der Ausrottung einer ganzen Volksgemeinschaft.

Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram fled Nazi Germany only to find racism as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. As a white woman and a Holocaust refugee, Marione was the most unlikely of heroes in the fight for civil rights for African Americans. This is her empowering story - a tale of courage, strength, and determination.

What would you do if you took a picture of your child and saw a bright white glow in her eye? How would you feel if the eye doctor said: “Your child has eye cancer and will need emergency surgery to remove the tumor or one or both eyes?” This audiobook tells the story of a 27-year-old deaf-blind female retinoblastoma cancer survivor through the eyes of the survivor and her mother.

Paul Weigel’s life always felt hard. Throughout his isolated childhood, with distant and detached parents, losing his college sweetheart in a horrible tragedy, and enduring the unexpected death of his father, Weigel spent his life in despair. It all just hurt. Everything changed when his daughter was born. From day one, Weigel and his daughter shared an incredible bond. She was a constant source of peace and inspiration to him, and he was determined to give her the love and security he’d never had.