A Nightmare in History: the Holocaust 1933-1945

Plot

From School Library Journal
Grade 7-10 A sober and somber chronology of a period in contemporary history that Chaikin appropriately labels a ``nightmare.'' The story of the havoc and tragedy caused by Hitler in 12 years is documented in relentless chronology that spares readers little. The book opens with a brief (necessarily simplified) history of anti-Semitism from the time of Jesus through the Middle Ages up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Hitler's methods of making first Germany and then Europe ``Judenrein'' (free of Jews) by creating ghettos; the organized ``Aktions,'' a code word for using machine guns to shoot masses of people; and the death camps are graphically described. A series of short sentences effectively punctuate and underline the horror, but Chaikin's use of incomplete sentences and sentences that frequently begin with ``And'' or ``Or'' is somewhat disconcerting. The focus is not on how and why the world community allowed the nightmare to happen. For example, Neville Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler and the politics of appeasement are not described. The bibliography, which includes Meltzer's Never to Forget (Harper, 1976) , is designed to allow readers to fill in those gaps. What is hammered home is what happened to the Jews of Europe from 1933 through 1945, and what steps were taken after the war to deal with it.