Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust

This ambitious work, produced in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the book equivalent of a museum tour. Each spread investigates a different aspect of the Holocaust: the rise of the Nazi party, the Wannsee conference, the murder of the mentally ill, persecution of homosexuals and gypsies, and the destruction of the Jews. While unusually comprehensive, the text does not dominate the book. Thoughtfully chosen, uncommon documentary photographs overwhelm the pages with their pathos and horror (a woman, sitting on a park bench marked ``for Jews only,'' hides her face from the camera; grinning children pose shortly before their mass execution in a Lithuanian shtetl; a killing squad trains its rifles on a Soviet Jew perched above a ditch filled with corpses). Individual experience is literally marginalized here, as the experiences of 20 young persons are telegraphed episodically alongside the body of the text. There is much to compel thought, but there is little attempt at synthesis-rather, each entry, textual or illustrative, seems to compete for the reader's attention. Ages 10-up. (Oct.)