The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum » (2nd Edition)

Michael Berenbaum has served as president of Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, and as project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors (Bulfinch, 2003).

"The World Must Know by Michael Berenbaum is a skillfully organized and clearly told account of the German Holocaust that consumed, with unparalleled malevolence, six million Jews and millions of innocent others — Protestants, Catholics, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, the handicapped, and so many others, adults and children. This important book, a vital guide through the unique corridors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., merits the widest of audiences." — Chaim Potok, author of The Chosen and The Promise

The World Must Know documents the compelling human stories of the Holocaust as told in the renowned permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Drawing on the museum's extensive collection of artifacts, archives, and eyewitness testimonies, and augmented with more than two hundred period photographs, this book serves as an enduring reminder of the moral obligations of societies and individuals.

This revised edition is enhanced with new insights and updates based on archival information that had been inaccessible to researchers until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe. It includes new photographs, redrawn charts, a new section on the Holocaust in Greece, an updated bibliography, and a new foreword by the museum director.

Published on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Library Journal

To mark the occasion of the April 1993 opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Berenbaum, museum project director, has written a lucid, sweeping, but not superficial historical overview of the Holocaust. Replacing a typical museum catalog, which ordinarily lauds its museum's artifacts, this book uses them to tell the awful story to which the institution is dedicated. Utilizing the museum's photographs, oral histories, and other documents, Berenbaum synthesizes an enormous quantity of material, organizing it coherently to show the gradual evolution of the war against the Jews from the perspectives of the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, while dealing with the fundamental themes of the Jewish experience. Visually evocative and unsettling, the book, supplemented with a useful bibliography, is an excellent choice for those who are not well acquainted with the subject or who need a concise synopsis; it will inspire readers to visit the museum and will enhance the experience of those who do.-- Benny Kraut, Univ. of Cincinnati