Recommendations
Books Like The Zookeeper's Wife
Best books to read after The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife tells how Jan and Antonina Żabiński used the Warsaw Zoo to hide approximately three hundred Jewish men, women, and children. These recommendations explore the WWII rescuer narrative tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the nonfiction story about the ordinary people who risked everything to save others.
- 1Buy
The Hiding Place
by Corrie ten Boom
The essential Christian rescuer companion — Corrie ten Boom and her family hiding Jews in their Haarlem home and their subsequent imprisonment in Ravensbrück; the most widely read account of a Dutch or German Christian family risking their lives to save Jews.
- 2Buy
Schindler's List
by Thomas Keneally
The Booker Prize-winning fiction about a rescuer — Oskar Schindler saving his Jewish workers from the concentration camps, Keneally's novelization of the real story that Steven Spielberg adapted into his 1993 film; the closest in spirit to The Zookeeper's Wife in its portrait of an unlikely rescuer.
- 3Buy
Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
The American WWII survival companion — Louie Zamperini's extraordinary survival in the Pacific, Hillenbrand's narrative nonfiction sharing The Zookeeper's Wife's commitment to a single extraordinary life as the lens for understanding what WWII meant at the individual level.
- 4Buy
Night
by Elie Wiesel
The essential Holocaust testimony companion — Wiesel's account of what happened to those who were not rescued; the necessary companion to The Zookeeper's Wife in showing what the Żabińskis were saving their refugees from.
- 5Buy
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
by Heather Morris
The Holocaust love story companion — the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov in Auschwitz, sharing The Zookeeper's Wife's interest in the small acts of love and connection that made survival possible in the most extreme circumstances.
- 6Buy
In the Garden of Beasts
by Erik Larson
The Berlin companion narrative — William Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany in 1933-1934, and his family watching the Nazi regime build in real time; Larson's narrative nonfiction method sharing Ackerman's approach of using a specific family's experience to understand the Nazi period.
- 7Buy
Number the Stars
by Lois Lowry
The Danish rescue companion for younger readers — Annemarie Johansen helping her Jewish friend Ellen escape to Sweden during the German occupation of Denmark, Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning novel sharing The Zookeeper's Wife's portrayal of ordinary people creating extraordinary rescues.
- 8Buy
Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
The literary French occupation companion — Némirovsky's posthumous novel of the occupation, and a reminder that among the European Jews who were not rescued was Némirovsky herself, one of the most celebrated French novelists of her generation.
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