Man's Inhumanity to Man

Any book about the holocaust includes examples and descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man, and Daniel’s Story is no different. While Matas does not use overly graphic description, the events speak for themselves. The events described in this book are at a minimum, astonishing. The reader is taken into a world where people are tied up and publicly humiliated, children are forced to harass and ridicule, people are crowded and pushed and starved and beaten and killed.

That people are killed is horrible but it is understandable, after all, this is a war-era. What is impossible to understand, however, is the way people are killed. They are thrown out windows, tortured, burned, chased, they are stripped of all dignity and life before they died, but an even more insidious horror, is the fact that men did this. Human beings, not an uncontrolled natural...