The Pianist by Władysław Szpilman — The memoir of a Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the 1944 destruction of the city, hidden by a German officer. Made famous by the Polański film, the book is more intimate and more shattering. Essential reading before any Warsaw visit.
Maus by Art Spiegelman — Not set in Warsaw but in the world that Warsaw's Muranów neighbourhood was built over. The graphic novel about Spiegelman's father's survival of the Holocaust is one of the most powerful accounts of what happened in Poland. Read it alongside a visit to the POLIN Museum.
The Ice Road by Stefan Waydenfeld — A memoir of a Polish Jewish family deported to Siberia in 1940, who survived the war by a different route to most. Gives context to the scale of the Polish experience in WWII.
Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski — The biography of Ryszard Kapuściński, the great Polish foreign correspondent and writer, who grew up in Warsaw. A complicated portrait of one of the 20th century's most celebrated journalists, and a window into postwar Polish intellectual life.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz — Miłosz's 1953 analysis of how Polish intellectuals accommodated themselves to communist rule. Written by a man who left Poland and refused to return, it remains the most penetrating account of the psychological effects of totalitarianism — and a key to understanding modern Polish politics.