Reading the Holocaust

Fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumoring. Reading the Holocaust challenges that bafflement, and the demoralization that attends it. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect': the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust. Searching, eloquent, and elegantly written, her book is an uncompromising attempt to extract the comprehensible - the practical, human reality - from the unthinkable. Reading the Holocaust has won the Premier's Award for General History in New South Wales.… (more)