Martin Gilbert. The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy. London: Collins. 1986. Pp. 959.

Richard Lukas. Forgotten Holocaust: the Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 1986. Pp. 300.

Nechama Tee. When Light pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in. Nazi-Occupied Poland. New York: Oxford University Press. 1986. Pp. 262.

Randolph Braham, editor. Jewish Leadership during the. Nazi Era: Patterns of Behaviour in the Free World. New York: Social Science Monographs and Institute for Holocaust Studies of CUNY, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. 1985. Pp. 154.

Deborah Lipstadt. Beyond Belief the American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press. 1986. Pp. 370.

The Holocaust of European Jews, and especially the Holocaust of Jewish civilization between the Vistula and the Dnieper - with its language, culture, economic system - has become the subject of continuing academic research. Recently a series of works has appeared which examine the question afresh.

Gilbert's is by no means the classic history of the Holocaust. He has attempted to create a portrait based on the pain and despair of individuals. He has carried out interviews with hundreds of survivors, and managed to obtain diaries. He gives us ‘an insight into the many different ways in which individuals met their death’ (p. 419). Gilbert also writes about the witnesses: sympathetic and indifferent, rescuing and denouncing. But the question of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews does not interest him.

The author is not always consistent in his method. On occasions his attempts to make generalisations leave misleading impressions. He writes very little about the German Army. Yet the Holocaust did not only involve the SS. On several occasions he cites Churchill as chief spokesman on Jewish affairs in the West, although it is questionable whether Churchill should be used as a symbol of the free world's interest.

Gilbert writes a good deal about the lack of resistance from Jews themselves. He shows how the German policy of deception and trickery reinforced typical Jewish behavioural patterns which had developed over centuries: ‘the traditional dependence upon the utmost restraint, and the reliance for survival upon every type of ingenuity’ (p. 386).