Customer Reviews

The Aftermath

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In a chapter named Vulnerabilities, Aaron Hass quotes an unnamed Holocaust survivor who asks, "What did the world learn from the Holocaust? What the world learned from the Holocaust is that you can kill six million Jews and no one will care."

This comment like many others in this superb book reverberates to the bone.

Hass answers a need not only of the dwindling community of survivors, but of those who, while neither survivors nor children of survivors, are nevertheless heirs to horrific pain--those Jewish children born in the shadow of the Holocaust and dressed by its memories, engulfed by a pervasive sense of loss and the need to reaffirm Jewish life.

"Survivors are people, not a phenomenon," Hass writes. Their feelings endure. Given my own feelings, I suspect that these are echoed by the feelings of the Jewish people, which is only now, after a generation, beginning to comprehend the enormity of what occurred.

"To refer to the Holocaust as 'monstrous, inhuman event' is to miss the point," Hass concludes. "The Holocaust was imposed by men and women on other human beings. 'It was a time when there were people, not only the Germans, but the others too, what wanted to kill all the Jewish people."

Unfortunately, such sentiments are still published broadly in parts of the world, without note, much less consequence. The press considers them just as unimportant now as it did in the 1930s.

Hass writes, "And so most Holocaust survivors believe that it could happen again." I sadly confess, so do I. Alyssa A. Lappen

Dr. Haas' book is an excellent blend of letting the survivors speak for themselves while molding those comments into cohesive, sometimes novel psychological insights into the difficulties they face and the issues they deal with every day. I highly recommend it.