Robert Jan van Pelt

I would love to see this exhibit but I’ve decided to not make the trek to southern California which is where it is now and it’s the closest place to me for this traveling exhibition. Perhaps someday I’ll go see it when it’s at its permanent location but that will be across the country. This is an exhibit catalog and in order to fully appreciate the material I do think that the exhibit needs to be seen on site. I know a few people who’ve visited the exhibit and it’s taken them 3 or 4 hours or longer to see it. It’s massive. This book can give only a sense of what is presented. It does that as well as it could though.

The print and images of the map were so miniscule I had to sometimes use a good magnifier to see much of it. The book was also hard for me to read because it was incredibly heavy and my preferred way to reading is lying in bed with a book resting on my chest. Those are my only complaints about this book.

Otherwise, it’s worth a sold 5 stars.

Beautifully organized. Powerful. Great images (photos, maps, objects) and text/essays too. The narrative manages to tell one long story, even though it’s about different people and places and times. There are many heartbreaking accounts and some heartwarming and inspirational stories too. There are too many in my mind to choose to list just one or a couple to represent them so I won’t mention any specifics. Everything in here is worth reading/seeing. I’ll leave it at that.

Well researched and with lots of documentation. Fine Further Reading lists which are not comprehensive (how could they be – that part would be hundreds of pages long) but are excellent. I love the categories: Collection of Documents; On the History of Oswiecim; On Jews and Judaism; On Jewish-Gentile Relations, Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism; On World War I; On the Weimar Republic; On the Third Reich; Biographies of Key Nazis; On German Concentration Camps; On the Expulsion of the Jews; On World War II; On the German Occupation of Poland; On the History of the Holocaust (general); On the History of the Holocaust (topics); On the Porajmos; On the History of Kulmhof and the Opeeration Reinhard Camps; On the History of Auschwitz (general); On the History of Auschwitz (topics); Testimony and Memoirs (Auschwitz); Aftermath. I should add some of the included books before I return this book to the library.

It’s divided into sections that have many parts. The major sections are The Encounter, Before Auschwitz, Auschwitz, After Auschwitz.

The poem on the last very last page of the book strongly affected me:

“You who are passing by
I beg you
Do something
Learn a dance step
Something to justify your existence
Something that gives you the right
To be dressed in your skin in your body hair
Learn to walk and to laugh
Because it would be too senseless
After all
For so many to have died
While you live
Doing nothing with your life”

- Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz survivor (1971)

This is a must read book (or exhibit) for anyone interested in learning more about the Holocaust.… (mer)

Well worth the money

Shermer and Grobman's _Denying History_ whetted, but did not completely satisfy, my appetite to learn more about the historical evidence for the Holocaust, so I bought and read van Pelt's book. I know that in this book van Pelt covers only a portion of the information that was in his reports for the Irving trial, but it was certainly enough to convince me that Judge Gray's verdict was the proper one. This book covers a lot of technical information that would possibly be hard to digest or be boring if it were presented by another author, but van Pelt writes very well, and I had trouble setting his book down. The author comes across as a very reasonable figure who is able to resist the urge to over-rely on either sentimentality or sarcasm. Perhaps I will need to read something else to internalize the horror that was the Holocaust, but I don't need to read anything else to see that it really did happen.

Finally, let me say that I was unprepared for what a big, handsomely bound, handsomely typeset book this would be. (I know that talking about the attractiveness of a book about the Holocaust is probably as bad as Jerry Seinfeld making out during "Schindler's List", but I figured that there might be some other bibliophiles out there who care about such things.)… (mer)