Holocaust

All too often, straight historical accounts of the Holocaust allow readers a certain detachment from the horrific events, policies, and processes that actually took place. Gerald Green's novel, Holocaust—based on his teleplay for the 1978 NBC miniseries—seeks to personalize the tragedy by putting faces on the real life tragedy and telling the story of two German families whose lives intersect.There are the Dorfs who 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 Reynard Heydrich. Alternately, we have the Weiss family who are Jewish, also "good" Germans, but under the new regime they are doomed as it seeks to exterminate the Jewish population.Green's story is told through first-person reminiscences of Erik Dorf, the ambitious SS officer, and the courageous young Jew, Rudi Weiss, who ran away as a young boy from his doomed family in an effort to...