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Drawing on oral histories recorded by the authors over 15 years across Europe and the United States, as well as on documents, letters and diaries, never before analyzed, this volume aims to change the way we look at the greatest crime in history. Starting with a brief history of Judiasm in Europe, the authors set the stage for World War II, tracing tensions mounting among populations, and the economic, social and political reasons for them. The Europe that permitted the Holocaust was not created in 1933, though thereafter descent quickly became inevitable. This study vividly shows us the early days of Nazism and the German leaders' plans for resettlement of the Jews in Madagascar or the rural marshes of Poland. It reveals the sometimes personal, sometimes political concerns - often having more to do with old land rivalries than anti-Semitism - which dictated different countries' treatment of their Jewish populations. It illustrates how new measures and abuses, each harsher than the last, were devised and implemented - even after it was clear that Germany had lost the war - until liberation was finally reached in 1945.Though this book captures the horror, it never allows the personal stories to be subsumed in numbing detail. We meet perpetrators and collaborators, victims, bystanders and witnesses, rescuers and resisters. What emerges in a multi-faceted treatment of moral dilemmas as well as facts, one which negotiates the chasm between two histories, that of the people who carried out these terrible deeds and that of the victims and their families. It helps us to understand how it was possible for between five and six million human beings, in the heart of a civilization that thought itself the zenith of human history, to find themselves singled out, disenfranchised, marked, imprisoned and killed.