Holocaust: the events and their impact on real people

Angela Gluck Wood9780756625351, 0756625351

The survivor’s stories – read their own words, hear their own voices

Between 1938 and 1945, six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. For many, the sheer enormity of the crimes makes it difficult to imagine.

Here historical information combines with moving first-person accounts to give you the full story. Maps, charts, and timelines provide eye-opening context and the testimony of survivors featured in the book and accompanying DVD take you behind the statistics.

Produced in association with the Shoah Foundation- a major US Holocaust memorial and tolerance education organization, with a foreword from Steven Spielberg.

Discover the faith and courage that guided people through one of the darkest hours of the modern age.

DK’s signature editorial aesthetic, combined with the searing testimony of Holocaust survivors collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute of Visual History and Education, makes for a sobering and visually compelling work of history. An extraordinary array of materials—Nazi propaganda, documentary photos, artwork, artifacts—are employed in the service of a broadly sweeping chronicle, beginning with Jewish exile from Jerusalem in 70 CE after Roman occupation and ending with modern-day Holocaust denial and the creation of memorials around the world. Each chapter includes a two-page spread entitled Voices, devoted largely to excerpts from 23 interviews in the Foundation’s video archives (an accompanying 40-minute DVD contains the actual interviews). One survivor recalls the horror of being herded onto dark, overcrowded trains en route to Auschwitz; another describes how her mother told her about every book she ever read, every movie she’d ever seen as they hid in a grave-like hole under a pigsty. Wood’s prose is economical and reportorial, and she clearly wants to reclaim the individuality and humanity of those devastated by this enormity (In many ways, numbers, especially very large numbers, mean nothing to us. What matters is each and every human being who was murdered by the Nazis) and she never resorts to lecturing readers on how they should feel. The book’s detailed charts and maps contain almost too much information at times, often demanding very close scrutiny to fully decipher. Overall, however, the visual sensitivity and expert pacing serves this vital subject very well.

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Table of contents :
Preliminaries……Page 1
Contents……Page 6
The jews of Europe……Page 12
Nazi rule……Page 32
The ghettos……Page 60
The murder ofthe victims……Page 82
The aftermath……Page 118
The end of the war……Page 142