Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
The Incomprehensible Holocaust
By Istvan Deak
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History
by Arno J. Mayer
Pantheon, 492 pp., $27.95
The Kraków Ghetto and the Plaszów Camp Remembered
by Malvina Graf, foreword and notes by George M. Kren
Florida State University Press, 183 pp., $22.00
Some Dare to Dream: Frieda Frome's Escape From Lithuania
by Frieda Frome, foreword by Robert Abzug
Iowa State University Press, 204 pp., $19.95
Double Identity: A Memoir
by Zofia S. Kubar
Hill and Wang, 208 pp., $17.95
Life With a Star
by Jirí Weil, translated by Ruzena Kovarikova, by Roslyn Schloss, preface by Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pp., $22.95
From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Norton, 333 pp., $21.95
The Jews and the Poles in World War II
by Stefan Korbonski
Hippocrene, 136 pp., $14.95
And I Am Afraid of My Dreams
by Wanda Póltawska, translated by Mary Craig
Hippocrene, 191 pp., $14.95
Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir
by Louis J. Micheels M.D., foreword by Albert J. Solnit M.D.
Yale University Press, 199 pp., $19.95
Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank
by Eva Schloss, with Evelyn Julia Kent
St. Martin's, 224 pp., $16.95
Unbroken: Resistance and Survival in the Concentration Camps
by Len Crome
Schocken, 174 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Lódz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege
compiled and edited by Alan Adelson, by Robert Lapides, with annotations and bibliographical notes by Marek Web
Viking, 464 pp., $29.95
Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps
by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman
McGraw-Hill, 240 pp., $17.95
The Holocaust in History
by Michael R. Marrus
New American Library, 267 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews
edited by François Furet
Schocken, 392 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Modernity and the Holocaust
by Zygmunt Bauman
Cornell University Press, 224 pp., $29.95
According to the historian Raul Hilberg, the United States alone captured 40,000 linear feet of documents on the murder of European Jews. Add to this other captured documents, police and court records, memoirs, oral histories, film documentaries, interviews, two thousand books in many languages (there are over ten thousand publications of varying size on Auschwitz alone), and we can say that the Holocaust is a uniquely well-documented historical event. Yet a host of unanswered questions remain, and we have not even agreed on a name for the terrible thing that happened. The term 'The Final Solution' has passed into common usage, but, fortunately, this obscene Nazi euphemism does not correspond to fact because nearly half of the European Jews survived. 'Holocaust' is the choice of the Jewish organizations, but as Arno Mayer points out in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, Holocaust is a 'religiously freighted word concept,…a term whose standard meaning is a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire in exaltation of God.' And in truth, why should one find sacrificial offering or exaltation of God in the involuntary agony of the Jewish millions, many of whom were converts or unbelievers?
Review, 9615 words
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