See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in today’s Poland. This is a case where you would think that only one thing had ever happened in the country’s history…
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Night | Elie Wiesel | 1,301,250 | 28,893 |
| The Boy in the Striped Pajamas | John Boyne | 893,261 | 15,839 |
| The Tattooist of Auschwitz | Heather Morris | 1,063,084 | 7,136 |
| Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History | Art Spiegelman | 352,319 | 11,169 |
| The Complete Maus | Art Spiegelman | 236,184 | 9,215 |
| Schindler’s List | Thomas Keneally | 162,837 | 8,261 |
| Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began | Art Spiegelman | 153,093 | 7,736 |
| Salt to the Sea | Ruta Sepetys | 232,282 | 3,802 |
Art Spiegelman (deservedly) does well here, if not quite as dominant as Marjane Satrapi was for Iran. But it’s clear that the winning place goes to Elie Wiesel’s Night. All eight of these books are about Nazi Germany and the Second World War, and seven of them are about the Holocaust.
I wasn’t quite sure about Salt to the Sea, which centers around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, but apparently the characters spend a lot of the book getting to and then hanging around in what is now Gdynia (then Gotenhafen), so I’m allowing it on the list.
I disqualified several books which have Polish authors, and so are tagged “Poland” by LT and GR users, but are not actually set in Poland. These were Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, in which the words “Poland” and “Polish” do not even appear; The Last Wish and Blood of Elves from the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, which may have roots in Slavic mythology but are clearly set in a fantasy world; Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly, which seems to be more set in Germany than anywhere else; and The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, which is mainly set in the USA.
Well, that was grim. Next up, Morocco, then Angola and Ukraine.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine