There is a phrase about judging the book by its cover, and it comes to mind as one is growing perplexed as one reads this book. For the cover shows a couple of very adorable toddlers with the six point star pinned or sewed onto their clothes, looking uncomprehendingly at the camera as normal children do, and the title is "Surviving the Holocaust: The Tales of Survivors and Victims" - so naturally one is led to expect a book telling real stories about those that survived, intimate details and tales as recalled by survivors, and the two kids on the cover in particular.
Instead, this is a very concise, very succinct documentation of the history of the Holocaust and its salient details, beginning with the German surrender and the attitudes at the time, and going into just how and where and when did the executions take place, with a few witnesses that were allowed to live so they were able to tell about it, despite Nazi efforts to the contrary, to cover up the whole massacre of millions. The numbers alone are staggering.
One of the effects of reading this is a surprising realisation about how one forgets one's own deep anger at those that wronged one, however just the anger - not because one subscribes to the doctrine of forgiving all crime and forgetting the victims, but because this horrendous account of what was done to humans by other humans makes one wish to distance oneself from any such emotion that would bring one into the realm of doing anything cruel to anyone even specifically known to be guilty, however they deserve it unlike the victims of Holocaust.
This is not to say one becomes pacifist saint forgiving all crimes and propagating such doctrines, opposing capital punishment for rapists and murderers and so forth, but that one wishes to distance oneself from any emotion that could bring one into the same realm as the sadists who perpetrated the Holocaust, generally and specifically. One could not, would not, belong to the same world as those that did the killings at Babi Yar or Auschwitz or any of the other dozens of places where Nazis exterminated humans - Jews, Roma, communists and other disseters, and more - in such horrible way, and felt superior. One simply could not, would not share in such horrors, not as perpetrators, not as one who even holds such an emotion!
And so it is a must read.
