Reading about the Holocaust

I don't remember when I was first exposed to the story of the Holocaust. Certainly when I was young, in elementary school, at hebrew school. I have studied it on and off throughout my life. I always though it was a bit sick exposing a child so young to the holocaust but what choice was there? As a Jew, as a human, you have to know what man is capable of. If you don't know, you can't stop it. I just finished the book "rethinking the holocaust" by Yehuda Bauer, the head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. This book is amazing. It helped to take the ocean of facts, figures, stories, legends, etc. about the Holocaust and tie them together into a coherent narrative that gets as close as I have ever seen to answering two critical questions: Why did the Holocaust happen and why does it matter to the world? For me personally the most powerful sections dealt with the question that I've never had a good answer to until now, "Why didn't they run/fight?"

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