First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima explores the way in which the main combatant societies of the Second World War have historicised that experience. Since 1945, debates in Germany about `the past that would not fade away' have been reasonably well-known. But in this book, Richard Bosworth maintains that Germany is not unique. He argues that in Britain, France, Italy, the USSR and Japan, as well as in Germany the traumatic history of the `long Second World War' has remained crucial to the culture and the politics of post-war societies. Each has felt a compelling need to interpret this past event and thus to `explain' `Auschwitz' and `Hiroshima'. Bosworth explores the bitter controversies that have developed around a particular interpretation of the war, such as disputes over A.J.P. Taylor's, Origins of the Second World War , Marcel Ophul's film, The Sorrow and the Pity , Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini in the 1970s or in post- Glasnost debates about the historiographies of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Richard Bosworth's book is a wide-ranging and thoughtful excursion into comparative history.

Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction and new bibliography by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. “Delbo’s exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo’s meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the ‘afterdeath’ of the Holocaust. Delbo’s powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf.”—Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Dori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost memories of her childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after a chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to understand one’s place within it. In alternating chapters, Katz journeys into multiple pasts, setting details from her mother’s stories that have captivated her throughout her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years later—against her mother’s urgings—in search of greater clarity. She reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her mother in 1943, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphanage in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother. Following this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz—and thus known his end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her way—all of whom seem to hold something back—she attempts to stitch thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life. A story at once about self-discovery, the transformation of memory, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the oppression of millions, Looking for Strangers is a book of both historical insight and imaginative grasp. It is a book in which the past, through its very mystery, becomes alive, immediate—of the most urgent importance.