Recommended by Lynne Lawrence

5/4/2017

This is quite an extraordinary book.  How, you ask, can there be anything more to say after hundreds of writers have delved into this topic?  Holocaust literature is almost a genre unto itself.  And judging from the length of Hayes’s bibliography, he has read most of it.  But now, with the passing of the generation that perpetrated, and suffered, the Holocaust, is perhaps the time for another definitive look.

Yes, there have been other holocausts – other genocides, other ethnic cleansings – and they continue today.  Which is perhaps Hayes’s point . . . if we have not learned how to prevent this outcome, then perhaps we need to look more analytically at the actions, events and conditions that allowed it to happen.  READ MORE