French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial

Rating:
Summary: Not a history book but a scrapbook
Review: Their passports, personal photos, and names -- all that remains of the over 11,000 French children carried off to the camps. This book is fragile, printed on thin paper with a delicate spine, and it is also has the strongest presence of any book I have ever read. The sheer impact of all of those young children cannot help but make the strongest among us feel sadness and loss. Much praise must go to the authors for putting so much time and effort into so many that have been forgotten.

Rating:
Summary: Most powerful
Review: This 11.000 children deported from France, their photos, their faces, their smiles are the most moving and powerful thing I have ever seen.

Rating:
Summary: One of the most moving books I have read about the Holocaust
Review: This book has succeeded with relatively few words what so many have failed to do with numbers, nightmarish photographs of survivors, and casts of outsized political and military personalities. In page after page the reader sees pictures of thousands of innocent children who did not know what awaited them. The size of the book alone might make one think it likely to be tedious, but after one hour of looking at the faces of happy children the reader feels emotionally drained but compelled to move through the entire book out of anger, pity, disbelief, and certainly, a feeling of outrage that the atrocities committed were done in the name of civilization, and with a perverted sense of cultural and "racial" purity driving so many people to commit such acts, by commission or omission, of unadulterated evil. The emotional impact of this book is overwhelming.