One could be excused for thinking that a travel guide on the Holocaust would be in bad taste. Having read Rosie Whitehouse’s excellent, The Holocaust: A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorial & Museums I can assure you that nothing is further from the truth.
One of the problems with Holocaust literature is not only the extent of it, but also the very detailed nature of most of the books. Both the Friedlander and Cesarani books I refer to above run to around a thousand pages each. I’ve long thought that sometimes this important subject can be difficult to access because of the very extensive nature of the books about it.
Clearly one wouldn’t want to see dummies guide to the Holocaust, self-evidently, this isn’t a subject to be trivialised. But it is a subject that needs to be made more accessible and readers – perhaps not experts – need to be given the opportunity to see the wood for the trees.
This book does exactly that. Covering some thirty countries and dozens of cities and other sights such as death and concentration camps within those countries, it is aimed at both the traveller whose visits are for the specific purpose of finding out more about the Holocaust or the curious traveller who happens to find themselves in a particular area.
This is a guidebook too, with useful tips on travel to the location and where to stay and how to get around. But its undoubted strength is in how well it covers the history of the place in the second world war and how it relates to nazi atrocities and then highlights important places to visit. Having visited some of these cities in past couple of years for my own research I can vouch how comprehensive the book is. It would have been invaluable to have had this as a resource before my recent research trips to Lyons, Hamburg and Milan.
The book is well written and presented in a clear and accessible form. What helps to make it especially readable is that dotted throughout are half page and full-page accounts, stories of individuals or explanations of aspects of the holocaust, such as the treatment of the Roma, the Nuremberg trials or the stolpersteine, the small, brass memorial plaques now evident in many European cities.
Some of these accounts are titled ‘Good to know’. One of them, under the section on the Netherlands, highlights a 2023 survey in that country where a quarter of all adults under the age of 40 believed the Holocaust is a myth or exaggerated. Only half of those surveyed approved of the Dutch Prime Minister’s 2020 apology for the country’s failure to protect its Jews during the Holocaust.
If for no other reason it is important that more accessible books such as these are added to the library of Holocaust literature.
Alex Gerlis is the author of Every Spy a Traitor and eleven other espionage novels all published by Canelo. His next novel, The Second Traitor, is to be published in August 2025.
