Translated from the Polish edition, which appeared in 2001, this is a stunning work, one of the most important books on the history of the Nazi Holocaust. Presenting an astonishing amount of information, carefully evaluated and usefully organized, The Warsaw Ghetto is not only a lasting guide to a great Jewish city, it is a monument to contemporary Polish scholarship, on which it draws so heavily, and a moving memorial to the nearly half a million Jews who at one time or another suffered in one of the Germans' most grotesque creations during the Second World War, writes Michael R. Marrus the eminent scholar in the field of Holocaust studies.
The establishment and liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto has become an icon of the Holocaust experience. Remarkably, a full history of the Ghetto has never been written, despite the publication over some sixty years of numerous memoirs, studies, biographical accounts, and primary documents. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, published by Yale University Press last year is this history, researched and written with painstaking care and devotion over many years and now published for the first time in English.
The authors explore the history of the ghetto’s evolution, the actual daily experience of its thousands of inhabitants from its creation in 1940 to its liquidation following the uprising of 1943. Encyclopedic in scope, the book encompasses a range of topics from food supplies to education, religious activities to the Jundenrat’s administration. Separate chapters deal with the mass deportations to Treblinka and the famous uprising. A series of original maps, along with biographies, a glossary, and a bibliography, completes this masterful work.
Barbara Engelking is professor and chief of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Jacek Leociak is head of the Research Team for Holocaust Literature Study at the Institute for Literary Researches, Polish Academy of Sciences. Both authors live in Warsaw.
The website of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology provides reviews of the book.
Found on our Polish partner website "Learning from History"