Books go out of print for many reasons. Some are no longer useful. Some are no longer popular. Some are no longer needed. This book, The Holocaust, was first published in 1981. Over the next ten years, it stayed in print and was available. It was purchased mainly by schools and libraries, since the catalogues that advertised it were sent mainly to schools and libraries.
Strangely enough, the World Wide Web has renewed public interest in the book. It is cited in many Holocaust bibliographies and on many Holocaust sites. Unfortunately, it is no longer in print.
What separates The Holocaust from many other books on the same subject is the emphasis I place on the issues that the murder of six million Jews raises for all humankind. As an event, the Holocaust may be uniquely identified with the Jewish people, as some historians have maintained. But as a historical fact--and one of the best documented attempts at genocide in human history--the Holocaust continues to inform, to challenge, and to warn all intelligent beings of an evil that is not beyond human behavior. Echoes of the Holocaust are all around us, threatening us, even while offering us the opportunity to rise above the worst that is in us and to exercise the best that is in us. This is not a lesson that should be the possession of any one people on the earth.
If we are to survive on this planet hurtling through a vast, cold, and uncaring universe, at a minimum we must learn to care for one another, to value every single life as precious.
My motive in bringing this book back to the internet is just to deliver this message. It is not a unique message, certainly, for it already appears in one form or another in almost every religious classic-- it has been spoken more eloquently by sages such as Moses, Jesus, Hillel, and Lao Tzu--but it is a message that often seems to be given lip service in the abstract and to be better understood when encountered in specific events.
I have attempted to bring the book "up-to-date" and mention newer echoes of the Holocaust where appropriate. For the most part, however, the book remains unchanged. Only the media is different. It is a vast web and I am pleased that you found me on it. I hope this book holds meaning for you as it does for me.
Seymour Rossel
Chappaqua, New York
October 10, 2000
© Copyright 2003 by Seymour Rossel
Dedicated to those of my family I never had the opportunity of knowing, whose unknown graves I will never have the privilege of visiting, whose lives would have made mine richer; and to my uncle who perished in the struggle to end the senseless slaughter. -- SR
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main;
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were;
any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
- John Donne, Devotions XVII, 1623