Five Best (books about the Holocaust)

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Five Best
Robert Rozett on essential books to keep in mind for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 2
April 26, 2008; Page W8

1. Nazi Germany and the Jews
By Saul Friedländer
HarperCollins, 1997, 2007
Friedländer uses an array of sources, including many first-hand accounts, to portray the unfolding war and Holocaust. He shows us Hitler at the center of the crime. But by giving voice to survivors, he never lets the reader forget that the crime itself was perpetrated not by a single evil leader but by humans against fellow humans.

2. Ordinary Men
By Christopher R. Browning
HarperCollins, 1992
How did "middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg" become calloused murderers who killed 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 more to Nazi death camps? Anti-Semitism certainly was a central cause, Browning says: others included the urge for conformity, the desire for advancement and the fear of appearing weak.

3. The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943
By Yisrael Gutman
Indiana University, 1982
An iconic photograph from the Holocaust shows a young boy, with his hands in the air, surrounded by Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a German soldier trains his gun on them. Yisrael Gutman's comprehensive "The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943" describes the years leading up to that moment... Ghetto resident Emmanuel Ringelblum (who would be killed by the Nazis in 1944) organized a project to document daily life in the encircled section of the city, and the surviving archive of diaries, announcements, reports and other artifacts enabled Gutman to create an extraordinary portrait of how Jews thought and lived, fought and died.

4. If This Is Man
By Primo Levi
Orion Press, 1959
Levi shows that, among men reduced by their tormenters to living like beasts, some found ways, at least for a moment, to assert their dignity: "We still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last -- the power to refuse our consent."

5. The Lost
By Daniel Mendelsohn
HarperCollins, 2006
In "The Lost," Daniel Mendelsohn takes us on a journey in search of his family history during the years of horror. In so doing, he highlights how difficult it is to determine precisely what happened to individuals in the maelstrom of murder, despite the vast body of documentation we have since collected about the Holocaust. Mendelsohn shows us people at eye level and thereby underscores a central truth: The Holocaust was not some mysterious aberration; it was an event deeply rooted in the story of man.

Dr. Rozett, the director of the Yad Vashem Library in Jerusalem, is the author of "Approaching the Holocaust: Texts and Contexts" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2005).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120917314367946677.html (subscription, maybe)

[DavidMS]

1. I am suprised that Hilberg is not mentioned

He was considered one of the foremost historians on the subject and The Destruction of the European Jews is considered to be the most exhaustively accurate history at this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destruction_of_the_European_Jews

[question everything]

3. This was his personal selection

Obviously, there are many worthy books but when one wants to limit himself to only five..

[Lithos]

2. What about Maus?

Maybe not academically focused, still extremely powerful.