Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto

Focusing on the Jewish ghetto in Budapest during WWII, Cole (author of the controversial Selling the Holocaust) not only explores the architecture of ghettoization, but also tries to enter the minds of the""ordinary men"" who built such places of death.""At the back of my own mind,"" he writes,""there is an image of an engineer working diligently in an office in Berlin, creating the most efficient door possible for a crematoria oven."" Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Robert Jan van Pelt and others, Cole uses architectural history, geography and studies of space and place to explain how the Budapest ghetto was built, how ordinary urban space was converted into a death place, and how architects, engineers, and municipal officials collaborated in the Holocaust. Cole's illuminating approach is scholarly rather than narrative, and some readers will be baffled by his placing of quotation marks around words such as""Jewish"" and""non-Jewish,"" as if to imply these are merely social constructs.