Robert Moses Shapiro Knihy

The huge number of victims of the Holocaust is emotionally incomprehensible. The real horror can only be apprehended on the individual level. In the case of the Holocaust, many such records exist, since, as Ruth Wisse has observed, "many of the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps . . . showed more concern for preserving a record of the incredible event they were witnessing than for their own survival." The studies presented in this volume survey this evidence--diaries, letters, oral histories, ghetto chronicles, rabbinic works, collections of photographs, songs--that originated in Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. Together these documents allow us to gain some inkling of the experience of those who suffered in the ghettos and concentration camps--without the coloration and rethinkings of later recollections.

This book brings together contributions by thirty scholars of journalism and history who look at what was reported about the Holocaust in the press of more than a dozen countries and languages. The studies examine the news media in America, England, and the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the Vatican, in occupied countries like Romania, Hungary, Greece, and Poland, and in Palestine under the British Mandate. By and large, the news media in the Allied countries neglected the story, while those in Nazi-dominated countries treated news related to the Holocaust in a wholly tendentious way. Thus the press, for a variety of reasons, did not cover the Holocaust, one of the central events of the twentieth century. As this book thoroughly demonstrates, it was perhaps the greatest ethical, professional, and political failure of the news media during World War II. If the press had been more responsible, and had informed the public in the West early enough and thoroughly enough, the history of the Holocaust might have been different and millions of victims might have survived. Published in association with Yeshiva University Press.