PositiveThe ObserverFriedlander is a world authority on the Holocaust ... His intellectual discipline may be that of the historian but his writing is animated by the passion of memory that only his generation can fully express ... Friedlander\'s real purpose lies in laying bare not the administrative machinery of genocide, but the failure of nerve at every level to confront it ... The bleakness of this book comes above all from its portrait of the collective timidity of so many, with whom it is uncomfortably possible to identify. They may have been distressed at what they saw but, in the face of the state\'s brutality and the success of its propaganda machine on popular opinion, they feared first for themselves ... Friedlander is on occasion too dismissive of the many small, often ineffective, individual acts of solidarity and courageous defiance he records. They remain the only redemptive moments in his narrative ... this massive work constructs a towering moral challenge to all our assumptions about the resilience of humane instincts in the face of fear and unimaginable cruelty. It leaves one cold for hours afterwards.
