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 Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls.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.