Hersey's novel, written five years after the end of World War II, is an early part of what has since become a whole library of books dealing with the Holocaust.

Despite the huge volume of material documenting what has been called "the worst atrocity in human history," for a decade or more some historians have been trying to deny that it ever happened.

On the eve of World War II, Hitler, whose plans to destroy the Jews was already part of his New Order, remarked: "Who remembers the Armenian massacres now?" He knew the human tendency to forget by any means possible the monstrous deeds the race is capable of perpetrating. Henry Adams in the concluding sentence of his famous The Education of Henry Adams looked forward to an age of peace for which his good friend John Hay, recently dead, had worked. If he could...