Holocaust Journey
Travelling in Search of the Past
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A travelogue, spanning two weeks, of the essential sites of the Holocaust, by the venerable historian and author . . . [A] soul-searching trip” (Kirkus Reviews).
In 1996, prominent Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert embarked on a fourteen-day journey into the past with a group of his graduate students from University College, London. Their destination? Places where the terrible events of the Holocaust had left their mark in Europe.
From the railway lines near Auschwitz to the site of Oskar Schindler’s heroic efforts in Cracow, Poland, Holocaust Journey features intimate personal meditations from one of our greatest modern historians, and is supported by wartime documents, letters, and diaries—as well as over fifty photographs and maps by the author—all of which help interweave Gilbert’s trip with his students with the surrounding history of the towns, camps, and other locations visited. The result is a narrative of the Holocaust that ties the past to the present with poignancy and power.
“Gilbert . . . is a dedicated guide to this difficult material. We can be grateful for his thoroughness, courage and guidance.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the summer of 1996, historian Gilbert (The Day the War Ended) traveled for two weeks with a group of his graduate students to a number of sites they had been studying in Poland, Germany and the Czech and Slovak Republics. The result is Gilbert's travel diary, a peculiar amalgamation of dreary minute-by-minute notations ("8.55 p.m. Reach my room. There is just time for a shower"), along with more emotional entries ("6.20 p.m. We wander about over the rough ground . Some are silent, some are crying. All are disconsolate....). The banality of a bus tour and stays in odd hotels juxtaposed with information about the deprivation, tortures and death that Jews met along the same routes are presumably intended to be a meaningful contrast, but the structure is neither interesting nor illuminating, and editing lapses (e.g., defining a "mikvah" at every mention) magnify redundancies. The best, most informative segments aren't Gilbert's diary snippets, but rather his excellent historical comments and the longer excerpts from many eyewitness writings. (The pages from Jan Karski's The Secret State, describing Izbica camp, give new meaning to the term "unspeakable.") Most travel diaries are significant only to those who have been on the journey, and despite its wealth of historical knowledge, Gilbert's is no exception.
