8 Compelling True Stories from History About Survival

In May 2001, twenty-six men tried to cross the border into the United States through The Devil’s Highway, a brutally dangerous desert. Only twelve of them survived. The book explores how these men managed to live through a lethal desert and a deep betrayal to reach Southern Arizona.

Mount Everest seems tailor-made for survival stories… that is, if you survive it. That’s what John Krakauer did, barely, when a deadly snowstorm unleashed during his descent. One of the only two survivors, this book explores the allure of such a lethal mountain, on top of recounting Krakauer’s story.

In 1994, when the Rwandan genocide began, Immaculée Ilibagiza’s life took a horrifying turn. All of her family was murdered, leaving her as the sole survivor. For three months, she and seven other women hid in a local pastor’s bathroom, hoping to survive the massacre.

But Immaculée walked away from genocide with something precious to her: a relationship with God that saw her through days of unspeakable horror.

When the plane carrying Nando Parrado, his rugby team, and his mother and sister, crashed, he found himself struggling for survival in the depths of the Andes. Unwilling to surrender to death, he led the few survivors on a terrifying climb up the mountain and across 45 miles of wilderness.

This middle grade book tells the story of a kids’ soccer team and their coach as they attempted to survive seventeen days trapped in a cave. While a rescue operation took place, the children and their coach underwent harrowing conditions that would’ve broken many… but they never gave, displaying incredible resilience in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

Auschwitz, 1944. That’s where a teenage Elie Wiesel and his family found themselves, before being shipped off to Buchenwald. Elie survived the loss of his family, the inhumane conditions of a concentration camp, and the knowledge of the human capacity for evil. This book tells his story throughout it all.

This middle grade book chronicles the struggles of Ilse Schwedder, a thirteen-year-old Indigenous girl who got lost and separated from her family during a snowstorm in northern Canada. Her traditional Indigenous knowledge enabled her to survive the terrifying challenges of a barren landscape, complete with dangerous animals.

Boat captain Salvador Alvarenga and his crewmate attempted to reach port during a terrible storm. It took more than a year lost at sea for Salvador to reach safety, which he did in 2014, unable to walk and barely able to speak. Franklin pieced together a multitude of sources to tell his story.