"This learned volume is about as chilling as historiography gets." Walter Laqueur, The New Republic

..". a one-volume study of Auschwitz without peer in Holocaust literature." Kirkus Reviews

..". a comprehensive portrait of the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps... serves as a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and a bulwark against forgetting." Publishers Weekly

More than a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom 90 percent were Jews. Here leading scholars from around the world provide the first comprehensive account of what took place at Auschwitz."

Jews have long seen the interwar years as a "golden age" for Polish Jewry and hold it in special reverence because of the community's heroic struggle against the encroaching darkness of antisemitism. During the years 1918 to 1939, Polish Jews constituted the largest Jewish community in noncommunist Europe and were the leading cultural and political force in the Jewish Diaspora. In this volume distinguished American, West European, Israeli, and Polish scholars combine forces to explore the politics, antisemitism, economic and social life, religious patterns, and cultural creativity of a period whose relevance is heightened because of current changes under way in Eastern Europe.

It took the Nazis longer to quell the Warsaw ghetto uprising than it had taken them to defeat entire countries. How could the Jews of Warsaw starved and persecuted, their numbers decimated by mass deportations to concentration camps, with few weapons and no aid from outside the ghetto walls stand up to the might of the Third Reich? To address this question, the author of The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943 looks beyond the ghetto uprising itself to consider the broader character of Jewish public life as it took shape during the occupation and ghettoization of what had been Europe's greatest Jewish urban center. The book describes the growth and development of the resistance movement and armed struggle against the wider historical background and the development of clandestine communal activiies in the ghetto. It makes use of extensive primary and secondary materials from Jewish, German, and Polish sources to throw light on critical events. The Jews of Warsawy, 1939-1943 is a massive scholarly undertaking, at once authentic, scrupulously objective, and deeply moving."

These 213 documents on the theory, planning, and execution of, and reaction and resistance to, the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews date from the 1920s through the closing days of World War II and focus on the experience of eastern Europe.

The crystallization of the principles of Nazi anti-Semitism, the policies of the Third Reich toward the Jews, the period of segregation and enclosed ghettos, and the stages through which the 'final solution' were implemented are some of the topics covered. Other documents shed light on Jewish public activities and the organization of the Underground and Jewish self-defense. Many of the documents of Jewish origin were not published previously. This comprehensive collection is essential for understanding the history of the Holocaust.

Yitzhak Arad has written numerous books, including The Pictorial History of the Holocaust. Israel Gutman is a coeditor of Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Abraham Margaliot taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Introducer Steven T. Katz is a professor of religion and the director of the Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University.

It took the Nazis longer to quell the Warsaw ghetto uprising than it had taken them to defeat entire countries. How could the Jews of Warsaw starved and persecuted, their numbers decimated by mass deportations to concentration camps, with few weapons and no aid from outside the ghetto walls stand up to the might of the Third Reich? To address this question, the author of The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943 looks beyond the ghetto uprising itself to consider the broader character of Jewish public life as it took shape during the occupation and ghettoization of what had been Europe's greatest Jewish urban center. The book describes the growth and development of the resistance movement and armed struggle against the wider historical background and the development of clandestine communal activiies in the ghetto. It makes use of extensive primary and secondary materials from Jewish, German, and Polish sources to throw light on critical events. The Jews of Warsawy, 1939-1943 is a massive scholarly undertaking, at once authentic, scrupulously objective, and deeply moving."