Perpetrators Victims Bystanders

"Raul Hilberg is the most widely respected historian of the Holocaust. (His monumental three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews is recognized as the definitive work on the subject.) In this new book, the fruit of a lifetime's research and reflection, he carries the reader along with the narrative flow of the best fiction. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders is truth, but like a novel, it focuses on people - people in all three categories of the title. We learn who they were and what they did and did not do. And what was done to them. The calm with which the author describes the most appalling events and the most terrible ironies is uncanny. He never raises his voice, never embroiders language, never strives for effect. He merely tells these stories that must be told, in one unflinchingly pure, clear sentence after another. Hilberg cannot, of course, cover everyone or everything, but all readers of this book, no matter how much or how little knowledge they may bring to it, will come away with an enhanced understanding of how this great human catastrophe happened - and with an unforgettable experience."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.