2026
The first to write the history of the Holocaust were the victims themselves.
All across Europe, Jewish writers documented the annihilation in letters, diaries, and testimonies while it was unfolding. The duty to record these experiences “is like a fire caught in my bones, burning inside me, screaming: describe!” wrote Chaim Kaplan in his Warsaw ghetto diary before he was murdered in Treblinka in 1942.
Still, it took a long time before the victims’ texts were taken seriously. What happens when we place the victims’ own experiences at the center of the history of the Holocaust? Helland’s book is a comprehensive presentation of this international genocide – from the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany up to the survivors’ experiences in the first postwar years.
He takes us through the entire long and fateful process that led from the totalitarian breakthrough in Germany to race laws, deportations, ghettos, mass graves, and finally the death camps in Europe.
This is a carefully composed volume of 374 pages, with notes, index, references – in 70 additional pages.
Frode Helland
UiO
