We Remember the Holocaust

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

PW noted that Adler's skillful use of personal accounts by Holocaust survivors ``gives readers a broad scope of genuine feeling.'' Ages 10-up. (Apr.)q

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-- An introductory description of the Holocaust that relies heavily on numerous interviews with survivors and the families of survivors. Adler superimposes a brief historical narrative on the interview fragments constituting the heart of the book, while Rogasky's Smoke and Ashes (Holiday, 1988), Chaikin's A Nightmare In History (Clarion, 1987), and Rossel's The Holocaust (Watts, 1981) use interview segments to supplement a more substantial historical narrative. Adler succeeds in exposing his readers to personal details and feelings of Jews whose families were decimated by the Nazi mass murder, and he thus provides a memoirlike--and very particularized--view of the genocide. A major thematic thread running throughout the text is the shameful lack of international concern for what was happening--from the U. S. refusal to allow refugees into the country to anti-Jewish pogroms in pre-Nazi (and post-Nazi) occupied countries such as Romania, Poland, and Hungary. Black-and-white photographs from the 1930s and 1940s appear on almost every page, and they accentuate the survivor accounts in the book. Although episodic and sometimes too fragmented, this is an appropriate and effective supplement to more substantial recent treatments, and it is an apt beginning point for young readers who find Milton Meltzer's Never to Forget (Harper, 1976) too advanced. --Jack Forman, Mesa College Lib . , San Diego