Karolina's Twins
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Gabra Zackman
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By:
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Ronald H. Balson
About this listen
In the tradition of The Nightingale, Sarah's Key, and Lilac Girls, comes a saga inspired by true events of a Holocaust survivor’s quest to return to Poland and fulfill a promise, from Ronald H. Balson, author of the international bestseller Once We Were Brothers.
“Readers who crave more books like Balson’s Once We Were Brothers and Kristin Hannah’s bestselling The Nightingale will be enthralled by Karolina’s Twins.” —Booklist (starred review)
She made a promise in desperation
Now it's time to keep it
Lena Woodward, elegant and poised, has lived a comfortable life among Chicago Society since she immigrated to the US and began a new life at the end of World War II. But now something has resurfaced that Lena cannot ignore: an unfulfilled promise she made long ago that can no longer stay buried.
Driven to renew the quest that still keeps her awake at night, Lena enlists the help of lawyer Catherine Lockhart and private investigator Liam Taggart. Behind Lena’s stoic facade are memories that will no longer be contained. She begins to recount a tale, harkening back to her harrowing past in Nazi-occupied Poland, of the bond she shared with her childhood friend Karolina. Karolina was vivacious and beautiful, athletic and charismatic, and Lena has cherished the memory of their friendship her whole life. But there is something about the story that is unfinished, questions that must be answered about what is true and what is not, and what Lena is willing to risk to uncover the past. Has the real story been hidden these many years? And if so, why?
Two girls, coming of age in a dangerous time, bearers of secrets that only they could share.
Just when you think there could not be anything new to ferret out from World War II comes Karolina's Twins, a spellbinding new novel by the bestselling author of Once We Were Brothers and Saving Sophie. In this richly woven tale of love, survival and resilience during some of the darkest hours, the unbreakable bond between girlhood friends will have consequences into the future and beyond.
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Critic reviews
“Readers who crave more books like Balson’s Once We Were Brothers (2013) and Kristin Hannah’s bestselling The Nightingale (2015) will be enthralled by Karolina’s Twins.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A heartbreaking tale of a mother’s love, friendship, and family in the face of increasingly brutal conditions and the constant threat of imminent death in Nazi-occupied Poland…reminiscent of the author’s first novel Once We Were Brothers…compelling.” —Library Journal
“The third in Balson’s promising series about a husband-and-wife investigation team specializing in Holocaust cases. [Lena Woodward’s] survivor account becomes the main source of suspense, since she is reluctant to reveal the full horror of what she experienced until the end…and [it] does not disappoint.” —Kirkus
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Harriet Tubman was born a slave on a Maryland plantation in the 1800s. She trusts in God, but her faith is tested at every turn. Should she obey her masters or listen to her conscience? This story from Harriet's childhood is a record of courage. Even more, it's the story of God's faithfulness as He prepares her for her adult calling to lead more than 300 people out of slavery through the Underground Railroad.
By: Wendy Lawton
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A Dangerous Road
- Smokey Dalton, Book 1
- By: Kris Nelscott
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Private Investigator Smokey Dalton works for Memphis, Tennessee’s black community. He has almost no interaction with the white hierarchy, even though they exist only blocks away. So he’s surprised the day a white woman walks into his Beale Street office. Laura Hathaway has sought him out because he’s a beneficiary in her mother’s will, and Laura wants to know why. So does Smokey. He’s never heard of the Hathaways, but his search will take him on a journey that will change everything he’s ever known.
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Interesting Slice of US History...but Ponderous
- By Rancher on 12-18-13
By: Kris Nelscott
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Behind Enemy Lines
- The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany
- By: Marthe Cohn, Wendy Holden
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Marthe Cohn was a young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe's sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz and the rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army and became a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army.
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Amazing story of a fighter and survivor
- By Magalie Busch on 05-06-19
By: Marthe Cohn, and others
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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The Immigrants
- By: Howard Fast
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.
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Narration style kills the story.
- By Glynis on 11-27-14
By: Howard Fast
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
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The Tea Rose
- By: Jennifer Donnelly
- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
- Length: 28 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but their faith in each other to spur them on, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their dreams.
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Wow. Wow wow wow!
- By I like to shop on 04-26-16
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Babylon Sisters
- By: Pearl Cleage
- Narrated by: Pearl Cleage
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Catherine, busy working with refugee and immigrant women through her small firm, Babylon Sisters, has taken on a powerful new client. She doesn't have much time for Phoebe's complicated questions of paternity - that is, until Phoebe's real father, B. J., a renowned investigative reporter, shows up in town to work on a story connected to Catherine.
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Sister Love
- By Florence Graydon on 03-26-21
By: Pearl Cleage
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Escape from Sobibor
- By: Richard Rashke
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories
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Rashke put a face to the good and the bad!
- By As happy as a monkey with two bananas in his hands on 06-23-14
By: Richard Rashke
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Wedding Ring
- A Shenandoah Album Novel
- By: Emilie Richards
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never been close.
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Loved it All Over Again
- By Kathryn @theBookDate on 03-26-16
By: Emilie Richards
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Picking Cotton
- Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption
- By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Erin Torneo, Ronald Cotton
- Narrated by: Richard Allen, Karen White
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape and eventually identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken - but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.
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Listen for the story not the writing
- By Professor Sombrero on 06-13-09
By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, and others
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Anne Frank Remembered
- By: Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity.
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A Fast Reading Could-Not-Put-It-Down book
- By Starlet on 03-07-10
By: Miep Gies, and others
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From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre.
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What listeners say about Karolina's Twins
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- UC
- 11-02-17
Hard to put down
Loved the story from start to finish. A mother's love is so powerful. Bravo.
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1 person found this helpful
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- History Student
- 06-03-18
Another “Can’t Wait to Hear What Happens Next” book
Ronald Balson knows how to weave a story. A master of researching WW II, his historical novels are gripping. The story’s characters seem so real, the reader becomes emotionally invested. This is the third book of his I’ve completed on Audible, and again I say, “Well done.” Thank you, Mr. Balson, for sharing your talent. I am a fan.
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- Jan Grizzel
- 05-22-18
BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO
This story is beautiful in so many ways and so emotional. I am trying to type this through my tears. You must listen. It is a clean well written and precise story of a time in our history that I pray will never be forgotten. To have survived being a Jew in Poland was extraordinary. And to have twins that survived is unheard of. I will be looking for other books narrated by Gabra Zackman. Her voice was perfect. I may have to listen again to the whole story in a day or two. You will NOT be disappointed in taking time for this story.
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- IS
- 04-23-18
Amazing story that will touch anyone's heart
this is a third book by Balson that I am listening and love it. want to listen to more. Narrator is great, changes voices dependent on character. This is the first time though I listen through audible; the other times borrowed though library. Audible so far is less user friendly. might be something I need to change Ion settings on my phone though
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- lou
- 03-06-21
Wonderful!
Another great book by Mr Balson. He can sure weave a intriguing story. All aspects were outstanding.
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- Tanya S.
- 08-25-22
Fantastic story
Great story about a time period we all should remember and learn from.I only gave it 4 stars because the previous books in the series had a better voice for Liam other than that it was superb!
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- CCL 2020
- 02-26-24
new to balson
the twins ordeal will live in my heart, a lifetime just as Ben and Sophie. I am new to the Jewish readings.
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- Marsha
- 10-15-16
I couldn't stop listening
I loved this book. I loved the story and the narrator. I couldn't stop listening.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Brenda Willis
- 07-19-17
Amazing
Such a beautiful story of a terrible time. Just amazing. Leaves me wanting to learn more, about these people, about this time. This story is complete, but others may not be...not for ne, not until I read them.
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- D.Watson
- 01-21-17
A heartbreaking, beautiful, and unique story!
I loved this story. I could not put it down! It is well written and well spoken!
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