Here are 100 books that Poland fans have personally recommended if you like
Poland.
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Having written in the genre of psychological/crime thriller fiction for some years, I am always drawn to original voices, particularly those who are prepared to go that extra mile to produce something fresh or a concept that hasn’t been touched on before. With this kind of writing, it is quite easy to get pigeonholed, and the author has to be as meticulously authentic as they possibly can. Thinking and then using the absurd in writing is probably the best endorsement for any book; the stranger, the better. In this modern, media-fueled world, you always have to go to different places and ignite new ideas and narratives.
This book has been described as one of the century’s truly necessary books.
If you are interested in holocaust literature, then this is a starting point. It's biographical writing at its best. No stone is left unturned in the writer’s account of his time spent in a concentration camp. A story of survival, this book is humanly honest in the portrayal of the unthinkable.
Reading this book for the first time was an experience not to be repeated. It is an essential read for everyone.
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing…
My passion for writing historical fiction set mainly in Poland, or including Polish protagonists is born from my own familial history. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht as a young man, who managed to escape to the UK and join the Polish Army in exile, eventually going back to fight against the Germans. His story set me on a course to become a historical fiction author; reimagining the past and bringing little-known stories to a wider audience. I find that the best way to gain a basic understanding of Polish life during WWII is to read widely – try historical accounts, memoirs, second-hand accounts, and of course, historical fiction.
This book is, I think, the cornerstone of understanding Polish history during WWII. Indeed, it is my ‘go-to' book before I even think about writing anything! It gives such a comprehensive view of all Poles – those forced into the Wehrmacht, those sent to camps, those sent out of their own country, and much, much more. When you have read this fact-based book, it gives you a greater understanding when you come to read historical fiction.
The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story…
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This is a vivid and gripping true account of how a brilliant Polish Jewish pianist survived by a fluke the Nazi mass-murder of Warsaw’s Jews in which his parents and three siblings died. The author hid in the ruins of Warsaw through two winters without heating and eating only scraps of food he managed to scavenge. Near death, he was, almost unbelievably, found and helped by a German SS officer who had heard him playing a battered piano.
The book shows humanity at both its worst and its best. The film by Roman Polanski is brilliant, but this memoir is even more powerful.
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film.
'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday
'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer
My passion for writing historical fiction set mainly in Poland, or including Polish protagonists is born from my own familial history. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht as a young man, who managed to escape to the UK and join the Polish Army in exile, eventually going back to fight against the Germans. His story set me on a course to become a historical fiction author; reimagining the past and bringing little-known stories to a wider audience. I find that the best way to gain a basic understanding of Polish life during WWII is to read widely – try historical accounts, memoirs, second-hand accounts, and of course, historical fiction.
So you will need a strong constitution to read this book. I first read it after leaving a museum visit to Auschwitz on a train heading for Slovakia. It was the most harrowing of reads, but I think, one of the most important of my life. Although we ‘think’ we know about Auschwitz and Polish history, this gives you a personal, often harrowing first-hand account of the camp. Make sure you have a box of tissues ready.
When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous "Angel of Death": Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account of the terror of Auschwitz.
I grew up in England in the immediate aftermath of WWII but have lived most of my adult life in California. I was inspired to become a writer of fiction after the death of my mother, wanting to find a way to preserve her remarkable story. While researching for my novel I was amazed to discover the British interned some refugees from the Nazis as “enemy aliens,” and fascinated to learn about the political resistance to Churchill’s domestic policies during the last two years of the war. I am astounded by the breadth of WWII stories that focus on the resilience of ordinary citizens and I always hunger for more!
Like my novel, 22 Britannia Road sheds light on refugees in England, starting after the war when Janusz and Silvana are reunited after six years’ separation. The narrative alternates between flashbacks to the wartime traumas they each endured, and the “present” story of their struggles to rebuild their lives. When Poland is invaded, Janusz joins the underground army and makes his way to France and finally England with the anti-Nazi forces. This mirrors the story of two characters in my own novel, based on my grandfather and uncle. Silvana meanwhile escapes into the forest to hide with her infant son. When she and Janusz meet up after the war, theirs is no glossy romantic reunion; they barely know each other and both harbor secrets that must eventually come to light.
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson is a heartbreaking and powerful novel about wartime secrets and the difficulties of adjusting to postwar life
It is 1946 and Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board a ship that will take them from Poland to England. Silvana has not seen her husband Janusz in six years, but, they are assured, he has made them a home in Ipswich.
However, after living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. While Janusz, a Polish soldier who has criss-crossed Europe…
I became enthusiastic about the history of the Baltics when my dissertation advisor persuaded me to use my language training in German and Russian to test the American Frontier Theory in the Baltic region. None of the various theories were applicable, but I earned a Ph.D. anyway. Later I taught in Italy, Yugoslavia, Estonia, and the Czech Republic. I've written a number of books and won a Fulbright Hays grant, the Dr. Arthur Puksow Foundation prize, the Vitols Prize, and others. I retired in 2017 after fifty-one years of university and college teaching, but I would still be teaching if my hearing had not deteriorated to the point that I could not make out what shy students were saying.
This is a provocative book. Its very title suggests how difficult it is to understand Polish history than other that a divine joke. Yet his scholarship is excellent and his insights enlightening.
This is especially true for the first volume, which deals with the emergence of the Polish kingdom from rude barbarism to a political and cultural force so powerful that, after its union with Lithuania, dominated East Central Europe for generations. The total collapse of the kingdom in the 18th century—largely to defects in the constitution that allowed foreign interference in the election of the king—has blinded us to what Poland achieved in those forgotten centuries.
The most comprehensive survey of Polish history available in English, God's Playground demonstrates Poland's importance in European history from medieval times to the present. Abandoning the traditional nationalist approach to Polish history, Norman Davies instead stresses the country's rich multinational heritage and places the development of the Jewish German, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian communities firmly within the Polish context. Davies emphasizes the cultural history of Poland through a presentation of extensive poetical, literary, and documentary texts in English translation. In each volume, chronological chapters of political narrative are interspersed with essays on religious, social, economic, constitutional, philosophical, and diplomatic themes. This…
I am a Harvard-trained historian of Central and Eastern Europe who focuses primarily on Poland. Although I am of Polish descent, my interest in Polish history blossomed during my first visits to the country in the 1980s. My initial curiosity quickly turned into a passion for Poland’s rich and varied past. Poles, who put great stock in their history, seem to have liked my books: in 2014 I was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The books on Poland listed below, all by outstanding female historians, only scratch the surface of what is truly a rich field. Enjoy!
While there are many treatments of the Polish-German borderlands, this pioneering work integrates borderlands and colonial history. Here medicine, migration, and colonization intersect in interesting ways. Among other things, it is striking to see how the colonized Poles, finding themselves in between the Germans and the native populations, also sought to be colonizers overseas. This is a shining example of transnational history.
Urena Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
Carolyn Porter is a graphic designer, type designer, and unapologetic lover of old handwriting. “Marcel’s Letters: A Font and The Search for One Man’s Fate” recounts Porter’s obsessive search to learn about Marcel Heuzé, a French forced laborer who mailed love letters to his wife and daughters from a Nazi labor camp in Berlin—letters Porter found 60 years later at an antique store in Minnesota. Porter’s book was awarded gold medals from Independent Publisher and The Military Writers Society of America, and was a finalist for a 2018 Minnesota Book Award.
Rynecki’s great-grandfather, Moshe, was a painter who documented moments of Jewish life in the interwar years: women sewing, children playing, wedding celebrations, men in prayer. When WWII broke out Moshe’s paintings were hidden, and afterward only a fraction were recovered. In this book, Rynecki recounted her decades-long quest to locate and archive the lost artwork. It’s a memoir about the lengths one will go to to ensure a lost family legacy will never be forgotten.
The memoir of one woman's emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II.
Moshe Rynecki's body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures before his life came to a tragic end. It was his great-granddaughter Elizabeth who sought to rediscover his legacy, setting upon a journey to seek out what had been lost but never forgotten...
The everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community depicted in Moshe Rynecki's paintings simply blended into the background of Elizabeth Rynecki's life when she was growing up. But the art transformed from familiar to extraordinary…
I’m the author of multiple middle grade and YA historical novels, including Torch, which won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Torch takes place in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and it is especially timely in the face of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Bear (a popular symbol of the Russian Empire) has mauled many of its neighbors in the past century, not only Czechoslovakia and Ukraine but also the Baltic countries that, like Ukraine, were incorporated into the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism in 1989.
While there’s no shortage of WWII books for teens, this companion to Traitor is among the few that presents the eastern front and Ukrainian and Polish resistance fighters who battled each other, the Nazis, and the Soviets.
Today’s alliance between Poland and Ukraine reflects their mutual experience of oppression at the hands of larger powers that transcends their own historic differences. The unlikely romance in The Silent Unseen serves as a microcosm of this process.
Poland, July 1944. Sixteen-year-old Maria is making her way home after years of forced labor in Nazi Germany, only to find her village destroyed and her parents killed in a war between the Polish Resistance and Ukrainian nationalists. To Maria's shock, the local Resistance unit is commanded by her older brother, Tomek-who she thought was dead. He is now a "Silent Unseen," a special-operations agent with an audacious plan to resist a new and even more dangerous enemy sweeping in from the East. When Tomek disappears, Maria is determined to find him, but the only person who might be able…
Professor Elie Wiesel was instrumental in my translating and researching my mother’s journals. My awakening to the dark period in the chapter of the Jewish history happened between 1971-1974 at CCNY, when our paths crossed while I was taking his classes at the department of Jewish studies. It was in his classes that the things that bewildered me as a child growing up in communist Poland in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath started to make sense. I asked my mother to commit to paper the painful memories, she buried deep inside her. She and the next generations have an obligation to bear witness, to be this history's keepers.
Remembering the heroes, Witold Pilecki got himself arrested. After two and half years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, he escaped. He witnessed the brutality, the mass gassing of Europe’s Jews, thousands each day. He was among the first to set off the alarms that Auschwitz was the epicenter of the Nazis' plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER
“Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe
The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage…
