Description: Author Richard Hollander was devastated when his parents were killed in an automobile accident in 1986. While rummaging through their attic, he discovered letters from a family he never knew -- his father's mother, three sisters, and their husbands and children. The letters, neatly stacked in a briefcase, were written from Krakow, Poland, between 1939 and 1942. They depict day-to-day life under the most extraordinary pain and stress. At the same time, Richard's father, Joseph Hollander, was fighting the United States government to avoid deportation and death. Richard was astounded to learn that his father saved the lives of many Polish Jews, but -- despite heroic efforts -- could not save his family.
Brief description: Christopher R. Browning is the author of seven books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (with contributions from Jürgen Matthäus) in 2004 and Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in 1992. Both of these books received the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. With Cambridge University Press he has published The Path to Genocide (1992) and Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (2000). Christopher Browning received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington for 25 years, before moving in 1999 to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History. He has delivered the George Macauley Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge (1999) and the George Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2002). He has been an expert witness at various trials of accused Nazi criminals in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as in the 'Holocaust denial' trials of Ernst Zündel in Toronto (1988) and Irving vs. Lipstadt in London (2000).
Review Quotes: "Sustained personal documentation from those who lived and died in the Holocaust is rare. That makes this collection of letters a precious gift to historians."
Publisher's Weekly