By Kevin Seabrooke
The founder of The Ninth Candle, a Chicago-based organization focused on Holocaust education and fighting antisemitism, Berryman was inspired to collect these stories of resistance by the experiences of his gradfathers—Sam Mindel, who survived the Holocaust, and William L. Ferguson, who was a top turret gunner/engineer on the B-17 bomber Flak Shack shot down over Germany during World War II.
The 12 chapters recount different stories of resistance, from the “Edelweiss Pirates,” working-class German teens rebelling culturally by listening forbidden jazz and fighting Hitler Youth patrols, to Sebastian Haffner, a lawyer who fled Germany and wrote Germany: Jekyll and Hyde in 1940 to help the Allies understand Hitler and the Nazis.
There is also Leon Bass, 19, a member of the segregated 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, whose officers were white. Bass provided support at Buchenwald, an experience that inspired him to become an educator. “I came into that camp an angry Black soldier. Angry at my country and justifiably so,” Bass would later say in lectures on the Holocaust. “Angry because they were treating me as though I was not good enough. But [that day] I came to the realization that human suffering could touch us all… Buchenwald was the face of evil… It was racism.”
Resisting Nazism: True Stories of Resistance to the World’s Most Dangerous Ideology, from 1920 to the Present (Luke Berryman, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY, 296 pp., Jan. 22, 2026 $27 HC)
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