Survivor Biography

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 purpose of Soul Survivor is to tell the real life story of Joe Townsend, who was flying one day with his family, and due to mechanical failure, the small plane he was piloting crashed - killing Joe’s wife and two small daughters. Joe was critically injured and survived brain injury, a stroke, hours of surgery, and months of physical and emotional pain to survive and then to thrive. Through grit and determination, he then began to rebuild a new life. This inspirational real-life tale of overcoming adversity will get people to realize their own true potential.

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.

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".

“Don’t cry darling. We need this baby. You will see.” With these words from her husband, Zoltán, Ibolya Rechnitzer’s fear of being pregnant during the uncertainty of wartime is somewhat eased. But in November 1942, four months after their baby, Andy, is born, Zoltán is drafted into the forced labour service of the Hungarian army and Ibolya must cope, alone, as a single mother and a Jew facing persecution in Budapest. Her son gives her a reason to fight, and Ibolya protects him fiercely during the war and after, when she must make a crucial decision that will forever alter their lives.

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.

It's October of 1993 in Hawaii. A drunk driver hurtles toward a bend in the road. From the opposite direction, accomplished advertising creative and triathlete Phil Slott takes a routine drive. As he eases into the bend, he meets the drunk driver skidding into the wrong lane and, in one second, Phil's life takes a dramatic turn. As he struggles to stay alive in the ICU, Phil's organs, bones, and much of his brain are broken. What he and everyone else come to realize is that his creative drive and passion remain intact.

My life has been full of unrequested lessons. Some traumatic. Others can be described as torturous. But I have always learned something of value. I am a survivor. "Angst to Ascension" is part of my story, in poetic form. I say 'part' of my story because my story is still being written. But, no matter what life brings my way, I promise to keep surviving and learning. I will continue my ascension.

Born into a Hassidic Jewish family in Poland in 1924, Mendek grew up surrounded by extreme anti-Semitism. Armed with an ingenious mind, he survived three horrific years in Nazi slave-labor concentration camps while virtually his entire family was murdered in Auschwitz. After arriving in America in 1946 — despite having no money or professional skills — his inventions helped revolutionize both the jewelry and packaged-salad industries. Remarkably, Mendek also applied his ingenuity to his own psyche, developing innovative ways to heal his heart and end his emotional suffering.

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.

In 2018, fourteen-year-old Claire Sarnowski stood with ninety-two-year-old Alter Wiener in front of the Oregon state senate to champion a cause the two friends both believed in: making Holocaust education mandatory in their state’s public school curriculum. Theirs was an unexpected friendship—she was in elementary school when they met, and he was an aging Holocaust survivor whose memoir she had read—and together they were going to change the American education system.