School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up-Intended to extend the experience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum beyond its walls, this book reproduces some of its artifacts, photographs, maps, and taped oral and video histories. Many of them are from archival collections in the museums of Germany, the Netherlands, England, and Poland, as well as those in the United States. The book is divided into three sections: Germany before and during the Nazi regime; the final solution, including the ghettos; and rescue, resistance, and liberation. Bachrach makes the victims of Hitler's cruelty immediate to readers, showing that, like readers, they were individuals with hobbies and desires, friends and family. Two interesting devices are used to generate emotional involvement. The first is an attractive ``cast of characters,'' guileless young people whose pictures, taken from their identity cards, smile innocently out from the page and in other photographs, enjoying life. The second is to insert these same identity cards and photos of life before Hitler into the narrative of destruction so that readers can trace what is happening to the young people at different points in the Holocaust until their death or the war's end. Thus, this is a very personal approach to Holocaust history and a very effective one.-Marcia Posner, Federation of New York and the Jewish Book Council, New York City (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This ambitious work, produced in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the book equivalent of a museum tour. Each spread investigates a different aspect of the Holocaust: the rise of the Nazi party, the Wannsee conference, the murder of the mentally ill, persecution of homosexuals and gypsies, and the destruction of the Jews. While unusually comprehensive, the text does not dominate the book. Thoughtfully chosen, uncommon documentary photographs overwhelm the pages with their pathos and horror (a woman, sitting on a park bench marked ``for Jews only,'' hides her face from the camera; grinning children pose shortly before their mass execution in a Lithuanian shtetl; a killing squad trains its rifles on a Soviet Jew perched above a ditch filled with corpses). Individual experience is literally marginalized here, as the experiences of 20 young persons are telegraphed episodically alongside the body of the text. There is much to compel thought, but there is little attempt at synthesis-rather, each entry, textual or illustrative, seems to compete for the reader's attention. Ages 10-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
The history, which draws on the considerable resources of the Holocaust Museum, includes rarely seen black-and-white period photographs and color photographs of exhibits. Long, unbroken columns of pale type, though daunting, are somewhat offset by the short chapters and the inclusion, throughout the straightforward factual text, of young people's personal stories. Bib., glos., ind. From HORN BOOK 1994, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
If you can't get to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you must read this book. Set up very much like the museum itself, with the same subject divisions, Tell Them We Remember is an armchair tour. It covers ``Jewish Life in Europe Before the Holocaust,'' ``The Survivors,'' and the horrifying steps in between. Brief chapters concisely describe some aspect of the rise of Hitler in Germany, the so-called ``Final Solution,'' and the attempts to rescue Jews, resist the Nazis, and finally liberate the victims. Although well- written and organized, this history stands out because of its generous use of the museum's large collection of photographs. In them Jewish families are not just shown as victims but also in the fullness of their lives before the Third Reich. Pictures of emaciated survivors of death camps are juxtaposed with photographs of those same people smiling and playing, showing that the skeletal, sexless beings were once beautiful men and women. These are perhaps the most poignant images portrayed to personalize an event so terrible that it can be difficult to grasp. Holocaust Museum staff member Bachrach also follows individual stories throughout the book in the margins. Young people's lives are traced from before Hitler to after the war, although some of their stories end abruptly in the camps and elsewhere. Even if you can get to the museum, this history is an invaluable addition to any library. (Chronology; glossary; suggestions for further reading; 80 b&w, 10 color photos) (Nonfiction. 10+)
Booklist Review
Gr. 5-9. One and a half million children and teenagers were murdered by the Nazis. This photo-history, produced in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, focuses on what happened to young people whose world of family and friends, school and play, was destroyed. More than 30 short, accessible chapters cover the general history, including the rise of Hitler, the ghettos, the transports, the camps, the gas chambers, and the movements of resistance and rescue. Sidebars tell the ongoing stories of individual young people and show their ID photos; some of the individuals are pictured several times during the period 1933-45, but many don't survive. The writing is direct, with no histrionics or gimmicks. A wealth of material drawn from the museum's large collection of photographs and taped oral and video histories supports the facts. The systematic murder is confronted here. We're told of the brutality, the medical experiments, and the corpses "stacked up like cordwood," and there are pictures of the death marches and the gas chambers. The Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, but throughout the book, Bachrach also talks about other groups and individuals--including Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled--who were marked as enemies of the state. The book's design is clear, with a spacious chronology at the back, a long bibliography, subdivided by genre and reading level, and an appendix of population figures by country. This is one of the best books available for introducing the subject to young people and an excellent text for the Holocaust curriculum now required in many states. ~--Hazel Rochman