The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures

During the Second World War, six million Jews--as well as other targeted groups such as Gypsies, Poles, the handicapped, and homosexuals--were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitter's Nazis and their collaborators. The Holocaust Chronicle, written and fact-checked by top scholars, recounts the long, complex, anguishing story of the most terrible crime of the 20th century. A massive, oversized hardcover of more than 750 pages, The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures is an excitingly unique, not for-profit endeavor that is a personal project of the publisher, Louis Weber, C.E.O. of Chicago-based Publications International, Ltd. As a book publisher, I am in a unique position to create this ambitious project, Weber says. The son of Polish Jews who settled in America in the 1920s, Weber conceived The Holocaust Chronicle in order to give something back to the Jewish community, and to bring the truth of the Holocaust to as many people as possible. The mission of The Holocaust Chronicle is to report the facts, clearly and free of bias or agenda. Featured are more than 2000 photographs selected after intensive research in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as other archives and private collections located around the world. Many of these images are in full color and most are published in book form for the first time. The photographs chronicle the Holocaust in starkly visual terms, capturing victims and perpetrators alike, as well as Allied leaders and the multitude of peripheral figures. Caption-text is detailed, and rich with facts and human interest. The books 3000-item timeline of Holocaust-related events is unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Spanning the years 1000 B.C. to 1999 A.D., the timeline pinpoints deportations, atrocities, and important developments in the Nazis Final Solution, as well as individual acts of cruelty, compassion, and heroic Jewish resistance. Illustrated chapter-opener essays place the most important years of the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath, 1933-1946, into sharp perspective. Nearly 300 sidebars detail significant people, places, issues, and events. More than 30 full-color, specially commissioned maps show the reader where events took place.

The sentiments and hatreds that gave rise to the Holocaust were not confined to the 12 years of Adolf Hitter's Thousand-Year Reich. The books illustrated prologue surveys the antisemitism that was expressed over many centuries in Europe as bloody pogroms, exclusionary laws, and other persecution. The illustrated epilogue documents the long, painful healing process that has lasted for generations and may never be completed.