The Death of the Shtetl

In this book Yehuda Bauer, an internationally-acclaimed Holocaust historian, recounts the destruction of the shtetls, small Jewish towns in Poland and Russia, at the hands of the Nazis in 1941-1942. Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls. In line with his belief that ´history is the story of real people in real situations´, Bauer tells the moving stories of individual people and communities. Over a million people, approximately a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust came from the shtetls. Bauer writes of the relations between Jews and non-Jews throughout the period (including the actions of rescuers); he describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, escapes to the forests, and Jewish participation in the Soviet partisan movement. Bauer´s book is a definitive examination of the demise of the shtetls, a topic of vast importance to the history of the Holocaust.