‘THE dark night is my friend, tears and screams are my songs, the fire of sacrifice is my light, the atmosphere of death is my perfume. Hell is my home.’ This is how Zalman Gradowski, a Polish Jew who was a Sonderkommando, one of the prisoners who worked in the crematoria in Auschwitz II–Birkenau, summed up his life in the camp. He perished while taking part in the Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944. Gradowski and some other members of the Sonderkommando buried their diaries near the crematoria in the hope that those who found them would make them known to the world. The authors of these documents had no illusions. They knew that in a short while the Germans would gas them and replace them with a new group of workers. Ready to die, they wanted their diaries to live.

Nathan Cohen's gripping paper ‘Diaries of the Sonderkommando’ is one of twenty-nine chapters in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, currently the most comprehensive contribution to the field. Based on impeccable research, this volume is divided into six parts: ‘History of the Camp’, ‘Dimensions of Genocide’, ‘The Perpetrators’, ‘The Inmates’, ‘The Resistance’, and ‘Auschwitz and the Outside World’.

For each of these sections, Michael Berenbaum provides a concise, informative introduction. The articles are written by twenty-six experts from such diverse fields as architecture, education, history, literature, pharmacy, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, political science, sociology, theology, and Jewish studies. A meetingground for twelve disciplines, these papers cover a wide range of complex issues and show how Auschwitz became the biggest centre of human destruction and degradation. From 1940 to 1945, like a powerful spider, Auschwitz relentlessly wove an ever larger web over German society and German institutions. Research from these papers points to a continually widening German responsibility for the crimes at Auschwitz. On a more abstract level, the book systematically examines the special efforts, meanings, and consequences of extreme domination.

In the opening article Yisrael Gutman paints a clear picture of Auschwitz's origins and its historical context and transformations.