In this companion book to the PBS documentary scheduled to air in May, the realities of the Holocaust emerge through the remarkable accounts of 27 eyewitnesses. Photos.

Witness to History, a comprehensive book on the Holocaust aimed at both laymen and Jewish high school and college students, is unique in that it is a fully sourced, academically reliable history of the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the experiences of religious Jews.

At last, the everyday fighting men who were the first Americans to know the full and horrifying truth about the Holocaust share their astonishing stories. Here we meet the brave souls who--now in their eighties and nineties--have chosen at last to share their stories.

“An invaluable resource” for individuals and institutions documenting the experiences of Holocaust survivors—or other historical testimony—on video (Journal of Jewish Identities). Institutions that have collected video testimonies from the few remaining Holocaust survivors are grappling with how to continue their mission to educate and commemorate. Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process—and analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. In this so-called Witness House, perpetrators and victims confronted each other in a microcosm that reflected the events of the high court. Presiding over the affair was the beautiful Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky (a woman so blond and enticing that she was described as a Jean Harlowe look-alike) who took great pride in her ability to keep the household civil and the communal dinners pleasant. A comedy of manners arose among the guests as the urge to continue battle was checked by a sudden and uncomfortable return to civilized life. The trial atmosphere extends to the small group in the villa. Agitated victims confront and avoid perpetrators and sympathizers, and high-ranking officers in the German armed forces struggle to keep their composure. This highly explosive mixture is seasoned with vivid, often humorous, anecdotes of those who had basked in the glory of the inner circles of power. Christiane Kohl focuses on the guilty, the sympathizers, the undecided, and those who always manage to make themselves fit in. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

50 years after the liberation of the death camps in Nazi Germany, the former project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and current director of its Research Institute, compiles a fascinating collection of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust. From the first boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany in 1933 to testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, this illustrated volume includes survivor testimonies, letters, government documents, newspaper reports, diary entries and other firsthand materials, as well as Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum's insightful commentary putting the materials into context. The book's chronologically organized documentary approach provides a unique perspective on this much-published subject, and drawing on the most current research in the field of Holocaust studies, offers readers an unforgettable and engrossing history of the Nazis' largely successful effort to eradicate the Jews and other "undesirables" of Europe.