A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors [With CD Audio]

This""museum in a book,"" as the publisher calls it, is an interactive volume filled with facsimiles of documents, such as the typescript of the 1935 Yom Kippur Eve sermon given by noted German Rabbi Leo Baeck reaffirming his faith in God and God's commandments; and sketches documenting the work of the crematoria by a member of a sonderkommando. The 88 illustrations include a rare color photo of a synagogue burning in the 1930s, to even more heart-wrenching images of piles of clothes taken from murdered prisoners and a bone-crushing machine from a death camp. The text by Berenbaum, a former president of Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, briefly covers the history of the Holocaust, touching on life in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Jan Karski's efforts to alert the outside world to the horrors taking place under Nazi rule. The accompanying CD records the voices of survivors themselves telling their stories, making this an excellent beginning for young readers or newcomers to the subject.