The Holocaust

"A formidable achievement . . . An eloquent record . . . He has also used his professional skills as a historian . . . to weave the scattered and often fragmentary evidence into a seamless narrative."—John Gross, The New York Times

"It is [the victims'] testimonies, culled from archives in many countries, from personal interviews and from an enormous literature in several languages, that give this book its immediacy and overwhelming impact . . . It is Mr. Gilbert's impressive achievement to remind us of ordinary human beings living and suffering behind the mass anonymity of statistics."—The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating work that overwhelms us with its truth . . . This book must be read and reread. It will be painful to you, but you must read it anyway. To know? No. To understand? No, not that either. But simply to remember all those whom the world, once upon a time, tried to forget."—Elie Wiesel, The Chicago Tribune

"Will doubtless stand as a classic history . . . Indispensable for the material it contains, for the soundness of its scholarship, and for Gilbert's ability to narrate and present this history in a style that bears the weight of the subject matter."—The Christian Science Monitor

"[Gilbert] weaves the cold facts with the nightmarish oral histories into a masterly chronological narrative."—Peter Hay, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"It remains for the generations coming of age after World War II to try to make sense of the Nazis' systematic annihilation of European Jewry. The need to give meaning to this cardinal moral event becomes more acute as its survivors and perpetrators grow old and die. With the publication of [this work], historian Martin Gilbert has made a landmark contribution to this quest for understanding . . . The effect of Gilbert's relentless microhistory is to breathe emotional meaning into the grim statistical record of destruction. The cumulative impact of so many names and towns and trains and killings is shattering . . . The doomed Jewish diarists and historians whose work forms the core of [the book] most feared that the world would never learn of the Nazis' crimes. Gilbert has given voice to their suffering."—Eric Lewis, Saturday Review