Recommendations

Books Like The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Best books to read after The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

Heather Morris's The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov and Gita — love inside the most notorious concentration camp. These recommendations explore the Holocaust fiction and memoir tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel or memoir that testifies to survival, love, and what human beings did to one another in the Nazi camps.

  1. 1

    Cilka's Journey

    by Heather Morris

    The companion Morris novel — Cilka Klein, who appears briefly in The Tattooist, after her liberation from Auschwitz is sent to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia for having cooperated with the SS; Morris's continuation of the same world.

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  2. 2

    Night

    by Elie Wiesel

    The essential Holocaust memoir — Wiesel's account of his deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald at fifteen, the most widely read first-hand testimony of the Holocaust and the book that most directly grounds The Tattooist's fictional Auschwitz in the real experience of survivors.

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  3. 3

    Man's Search for Meaning

    by Viktor E. Frankl

    The psychiatrist's Holocaust memoir and philosophy — Frankl's account of his time in Auschwitz and three other camps and the psychological theory he developed from the experience; the other essential short book about survival in Auschwitz.

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  4. 4

    Maus

    by Art Spiegelman

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir — Spiegelman's father's story of surviving Auschwitz, told with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the most celebrated artistic reckoning with the Holocaust and the companion that most directly addresses the same Auschwitz that Lale Sokolov survived.

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  5. 5

    Sophie's Choice

    by William Styron

    The American literary Holocaust companion — Stingo in Brooklyn meeting Sophie Zawistowski and Nathan Landau, Styron's Styron Prize-winning novel about what Sophie did to survive Auschwitz and what it cost her after the war.

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  6. 6

    The Diary of a Young Girl

    by Anne Frank

    The most widely read Holocaust primary document — Anne Frank's diary from hiding in the Annex in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944; the companion for Tattooist readers who want to read the voice of someone who did not survive what Lale Sokolov survived.

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  7. 7

    Suite Francaise

    by Irene Nemirovsky

    The literary posthumous Holocaust companion — the novel Némirovsky was writing during the occupation before her arrest and death in Auschwitz; the most literary French novel of the occupation and the companion that most directly connects the fictional world of The Tattooist to the real world of its setting.

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  8. 8

    The Zookeeper's Wife

    by Diane Ackerman

    The Warsaw Uprising companion — Jan and Antonina Żabiński using the Warsaw Zoo to hide Jewish families during the Nazi occupation, Ackerman's nonfiction narrative sharing The Tattooist's interest in the specific acts of courage and love that ordinary people performed in the most extreme circumstances.

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