A NIGHTMARE IN HISTORY: The Holocaust 1933-1945

The unfathomable events of the Holocaust are presented quietly and with restraint. As the details of human suffering accumulate, a reader gains some sort of understanding of how the Nazi machine worked and why the Jews--and others--were so helpless before it. The book is unusually clear--both in historical presentation and in trying to define for children the issues of good and evil, of how such a thing could possibly happen, of the ""silence of God."" The chapters on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and ""The Story of Help""--about individuals and countries who tried to save Jews (and about those who turned away)--are outstanding. Included is Eisenhower's prescient letter (to General George C. Marshall), written after he visited the concentration camp in Ohrdruf during liberation: ""I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"" Patient in the telling, the book itself becomes a moral force, the author convinced, perhaps, that knowledge of these events is crucial to survival of goodness in the human race. This careful and thorough book is essential and superb. Photographs. Excellent annotated bibliography. Index.