The Death of the Shtetl
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Yehuda Bauer
View Inside
Format: PaperPrice: $29.00
In this book, Yehuda Bauer, an internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian, describes the destruction of small Jewish townships, the shtetls, in what was the eastern part of Poland by 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 Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls.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 moving stories about what happened to individual Jews and their 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 (including the actions of rescuers); he also describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, efforts to escape 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.
"Yehuda Bauer is one of the most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. The Death of the Shtetl is an unusual study of a central aspect of the death of a Jewish nation in Eastern Europe, early annihilated, little documented and little known. The book contains a passionate argument about the writing of history by a veteran historian. The investigation itself is a tour de force."--Benjamin Harshav, editor of The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944
“Yehuda Bauer [is] a towering and commanding figure among the historians of the Holocaust . . . What makes [The Death of the Shtetl] so important is his insistence on adhering to the highest and strictest standards of scholarship.”
--Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish JournalPublication Date: December 7, 2010
