We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help.

Well-Written Holocaust Books (848 books) - Goodreads Well-Written Holocaust Books (848 books) - Goodreads

Anyone who’s looked at this—and I’ve spent years and years and years trying to get my head around it—will still, on occasion, find it utterly incomprehensible, despite being able to give an account of it. In the end, out of more than 140,000 people investigated in the Federal Republic, fewer than 6,660 were actually found guilty—and of these, nearly 5,000 received lenient sentences of less than two years. Can't speak to On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, but I would definitely agree as far as And Then There Were None is concerned. Here is a man who is telling his father’s story, a story of death and tragedy, yet, he does not have the best relationship with him. Then, a moment later, these people came back and threw down some bread, and he suddenly realized the people had been discussing how they could help, had gone back to get some bread and then thrown it over to them.Vrba was one of two Slovakian Jews (the other was Alfred Wetzler) who escaped from Auschwitz in early April 1944 and wrote a lengthy description about the systematic mass murder taking place in the camp. Miraculously surviving three years in that hell, he is most familiar to Americans from the interviews he did with Claude Lanzmann for the 1985 film Shoah. I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The only positive thing that came out of this ordeal for Gerda was that her future husband, Lieutenant Kurt Klein, was part of the U.

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The judges of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize look for books that explain high quality science in an engaging and accessible way. The other thing to add about Bauer is that he was the guy who gave Mossad, the Israeli secret service, the tip-off on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann so that they could kidnap him and bring him to Jerusalem for trial. He’s looking at how the inner life could assist in survival, which I think is extraordinarily interesting, although it’s not a sufficient explanation by any means. Once there, Lidia was picked by Dr Josef Mengele for his experiments and survived eighteen months of unimaginable trauma, while her mother risked her life to secretly visit her. He was determined to ensure that victims and survivors were brought from all around the world to give evidence, a bit like the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

Finally, I wonder whether it is useful to have this symbol—Auschwitz—as a kind of uniquely evil moment in human history. What begins, familiarly, as the story of a young boy learning about the tragic but mysterious fate of his relatives in the Holocaust, ends in a continent-spanning labyrinth, a sad and seductive tale of near mythic proportions. With its apparatus of gas chambers (made to look like showering facilities) and four crematoria, Auschwitz II could literally murder 15,000 people per day.