The Tattooist of Auschwitz

In June 1941, Leningrad still has white nights when Tatiana Metanova meets Red Army officer Alexander Belov—then Hitler’s armies close the siege and hunger, secrets, and an impossible love take the city. Paullina Simons’s opening Bronze Horseman novel is World War II historical romance of the siege of Leningrad: war, family, and a passion that has to survive the winter.

A writer corresponds with islanders who survived German occupation—and finds a home among them.

In German-occupied Kraków, womanizing industrialist Oskar Schindler runs an enamelworks on Jewish labor—then, as the ghetto is liquidated and Płaszów’s commandant turns murder into sport, he spends fortune and SS credit to keep twelve hundred names on a list that means life. Thomas Keneally’s Booker-winning novel is WWII biographical historical fiction of a war profiteer who gambled everything to pull workers out of the path of the camps.

In March 1939 the Kurc family gathers for Passover in Radom, Poland; by autumn the war has scattered Sol and Nechuma’s children from the ghetto to a Siberian camp, occupied France, and a refugee ship bound for Brazil. Georgia Hunter’s 2017 novel is World War II saga historical fiction of the years they spend trying to stay alive and find one another, drawn from the author’s own family.

In the autumn of 1941 a German U-boat commander—the Old Man—and his crew leave the French coast for another Battle of the Atlantic patrol, hunting supply ships through storms while destroyers and depth charges hunt them. Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 novel (English translation) is World War II military historical fiction of that boat: a war correspondent aboard, weeks underwater, and a crew the Atlantic is more likely to keep than to send home.

Nine-year-old Bruno is moved from Berlin to a lonely house beside a fence his sister calls Out-With; from his window he sees people in striped pajamas, and he makes a secret friend named Shmuel on the other side. John Boyne’s 2006 novel is WWII Holocaust historical fiction told as a child’s fable: a friendship through the wire at Auschwitz, and a title readers still search by name.