What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThose Who Save Us
Jenna Blum · 496 pages
For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by
Schindler's List
Thomas Keneally · 429 pages
In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman · 296 pages
A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father's story and history itself.
Sarah's Key
Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages
Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th
Milkweed
Jerry Spinelli · 232 pages
He’s a boy called Jew. Gypsy. Stopthief. Runt. Happy. Fast. Filthy son of Abraham. He’s a boy who lives in the streets of Warsaw. He’s a boy who steals food for himself and the other orphans. He’s a boy who believes in bread, and mothers, and angels. He’s a boy who wants to be a Nazi some day, with tall shiny jackboots and a gleaming Eagle hat of his own. Until the day that suddenly makes him
Sophie's Choice
William Styron · 625 pages
The gripping, unforgettable story of Stingo, a 22-year-old writer; Sophie, a Polish-Catholic beauty who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; and Nathan, her mercurial lover. The three friends share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.
Lilac Girls
Martha Hall Kelly · 512 pages
Inspired by the life of a real World War II heroine, this debut novel reveals a story of love, redemption, and secrets that were hidden for decades. New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939—and then sets its sights on Fr
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945
Wladyslaw Szpilman · 224 pages
A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."
Mila 18
Leon Uris · 539 pages
An historical novel about the Jewish Resistance fighters who took on the might of the Nazis in German occupied Warsaw during WW2. As the Jewish ghetto gradually shrinks and becomes cut off from the outside world a handful of its residents take up arms to maintain their freedom and their dignity in a struggle they know cannot be won.
The Librarian of Auschwitz
Antonio Iturbe · 432 pages
Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, this is the incredible story of a girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust.
Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages
A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne · 240 pages
La atrocidad bajo la ingenua mirada de un niño.
War and Remembrance
Herman Wouk · 1,121 pages
From the Middle East, to Moscow, to Hitler's death camps, the members of the Henry family face grave danger as they fight in the Second World War.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Heather Morris · 304 pages
This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov - an unforgettable love story in the midst of atrocity. In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover he speaks several l
The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult · 460 pages
Sage Singer becomes friends with an old man who is particularly beloved in her community after they strike up a conversation at the bakery where she works. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he asks Sage for a favor, to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses, but then he tells her he deserves to die. Once he reveals his secret, Sage wonders if he is right.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages
> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu
The Devil's Arithmetic
Jane Yolen · 170 pages
Hannah thinks tonight's Passover Seder will be the same as always. Little does she know that this year she will be mysteriously transported into the past where only she knows the horrors that await. Hannah resents the traditions of her Jewish heritage until time travel places her in the middle of a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland. Hannah resents stories of her Jewish heritage a
Daniel's Story
Carol Matas · 136 pages
Daniel, whose family suffers as the Nazis rise to power in Germany, describes his imprisonment in a concentration camp and his eventual liberation.
The Death's Head Chess Club
John Donoghue · 400 pages
SS Obersturmfuhrer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front. After being badly wounded he is fit only for administrative duty and his first and most pressing task is to improve flagging camp morale. He sets up a chess club which thrives, as the officers and enlisted men are allowed to gamble on the results of the games. However, when Meissner learns from a chance remark that chess
The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw · 677 pages
The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.