Holocaust: A History - Hardcover

Dwork, Deborah; Van Pelt, Robert Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393051889 ISBN 13: 9780393051889

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2002

Synopsis

A chronicle of events beginning in the Middle Ages through the modern era reveals the unfolding of Nazism and how it brought about the Holocaust, negotiating the division between the histories of its perpetrators and the victims and their families. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Debórah Dwork is Rose Professor of Holocaust History and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Robert Jan van Pelt is professor of cultural history at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Their book Auschwitz won the National Jewish Book Award.

From Publishers Weekly

During the past half-century Holocaust studies have perhaps become the most vital area of historical research. Yet books with the significance of this new history of the Holocaust are rare it is exhaustive as well as consistently insightful. From the opening chapters in which the authors, contradicting popular wisdom, argue that the direct eliminationist roots of the Holocaust are found not so much in the centuries-old European anti-Semitic legal regulations, but in the Inquisition's intention of social purification, the Terror of the French Revolution and the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915 Dwork and van Pelt challenge and provoke. Rather then viewing the Holocaust as a distinct historical phenomenon, the authors do their best to integrate it into a wide range of historical, cultural and social conditions. In discussing the German subjugation of Poland, for example, they focus on how gentile Poles saw the extermination of Jews as a precursor to their own fate; in their discussion of how Jews coped with ghetto life, the authors examine in detail the underground schooling systems that benefited both students and teachers. They also place the history of rescue efforts (usually based on personalities such as Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg) in a broader and more complicated geographic and social perspective. The book is also filled with fascinating details that challenge our preconceptions for instance, it is a myth, they note, that King Christian of Denmark wore a yellow star in sympathy with his country's Jews, since no Nazi order was ever given for Danish Jews to be so identified. Like their important earlier work Auschwitz (winner of a National Jewish Book Award), this is beautifully and lucidly written, presenting complex and important information in a highly accessible manner. 75 illus., 16 maps.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393051889
• ISBN 13: 9780393051889
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480