Ackerman, Diane, The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
Adamczyk, Wesley, When God Looked the Other Way, an Odyssey of War, Exile and Redemption.
Paul, Allen, Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth
Recommended Reading
- Berenbaum, Michael, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis.
- Berenbaum, Michael and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History. The Known, The Unknown, The Disputed, and the Reexamined.
- Fairweather, Jack, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz.
- Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Two Sisters in Auschwitz.
- Karski, Jan, A, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World. Washington, DC.: Georgetown University Press, 2013. Author’s note: The account was first published in 1944 by Houghton Mifflin. Jan Karski passed away in 2000. This latest edition, in conjunction with the Jan Karski Institute, includes a foreword by Madeleine Albright.
- Klein, Gerda Weissman, All But My Life, A Memoir. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957, 1995.
- Kochanski, Halik, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War.
- Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz. New York, New York: Touchstone, 1996. Originally published in 1958 in Italian, as Se questo è un uamo.
- Lower, Wendy, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields.
- Mazzeo, Tilar J., Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto
- Mulley, Clare,The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
- Opdyke, Irene, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
- Olson, Olson and Stanley Cloud, A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II
- Paul, Allen, Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth
- Pilecki, Witold, The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery
- Rawicz, Slavomir, The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
- Shephard, Jim, The Book of Aron
- Szpilman, Władysław, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945.
- Wiesel, Elie, Dawn.
- Wiesel, Elie, Night.
- Wetzler, Alfred, Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol.
- Wiernicki, John, War in the Shadow of Auschwitz; Memoirs of a Polish Resistance Fighter and Survivor of the Death Camps.
Author’s Note – There are thousands of books written on the Holocaust and World War II. This list speaks specifically to the Polish experience or classics recommended by multiple scholars as important books on the Holocaust and Auschwitz, a German death camp located in Poland. Some are memoirs, others are more scholastic in nature. The list is not intended to cover every possible book. –Katrina Shawver