Holocaust

The epic novel of two families and the genocide in Nazi Germany, by the writer of the blockbuster TV miniseries. The Dorfs are “good” Germans, loyal to the new Nazi regime, with whom their son Erik, a promising lawyer, finds his ambitions realized with the SS at the side of the ruthless Reinhard Heydrich. The Weisses are Jewish, also “good” Germans—but under the new regime, they are doomed. Told through the reminiscences of Erik Dorf, the ambitious SS officer, and the courageous young Jew Rudi Weiss, who ran away from his family as a young boy in an effort to fight the Nazis, this novel takes us through almost every significant event of the Third Reich, from the horrific reality of Kristallnacht to the mass exterminations at Auschwitz. It is a portrait of the extraordinary choices all Germans were forced to make on a daily basis—and the unimaginable consequences if they were wrong. A winner of the Dag Hammarskjöld International Prize, with more than two million copies sold, Holocaust is an unforgettable glimpse into this monumental human tragedy. Historical accounts of tragedies such as the Holocaust often allow readers and students a certain detachment in the formidable but impersonal catalogue of numbers, events, policies and processes. Gerald Green's novel Holocaust, which is based on his teleplay for the 1978 NBC miniseries, seeks to put faces on the tragedy by telling the story of the experience of two German families whose lives intersect at certain points. The Dorfs are "good" Germans, loyal to the new Nazi regime, and their son Erik, a promising lawyer, finds his ambitions realized in the SS at the side of the ruthless Reynard Heydrich. The Weiss family is Jewish, also seemingly "good" Germans, but doomed under the new regime and its determination to exterminate the Jewish population.