Their passports, personal photos, and names -- all that remains of the over 11,000 French children carried off to the camps. This book is fragile, printed on thin paper with a delicate spine, and it is also has the strongest presence of any book I have ever read. The sheer impact of all of those young children cannot help but make the strongest among us feel sadness and loss. Much praise must go to the authors for putting so much time and effort into so many that have been forgotten.

This 11.000 children deported from France, their photos, their faces, their smiles are the most moving and powerful thing I have ever seen.

This book has succeeded with relatively few words what so many have failed to do with numbers, nightmarish photographs of survivors, and casts of outsized political and military personalities. In page after page the reader sees pictures of thousands of innocent children who did not know what awaited them. The size of the book alone might make one think it likely to be tedious, but after one hour of looking at the faces of happy children the reader feels emotionally drained but compelled to move through the entire book out of anger, pity, disbelief, and certainly, a feeling of outrage that the atrocities committed were done in the name of civilization, and with a perverted sense of cultural and "racial" purity driving so many people to commit such acts, by commission or omission, of unadulterated evil. The emotional impact of this book is overwhelming.

The books images are very very disturbing. I will never be the same, little kids should not see this. Good Lord all the humanity. Please do not read it if you are weak of heart. If you are satomasikist then go right ahead.

This slim volume contains over forty drawings and paintings done by David Olere. He did these works from personal remembrances of his time at Auschwitz death camp. The text is written by his son, Alexandre, who was not at the camp, but hiding out with his mother.

Olere spent his time in the camp working in the crematorium. He would bring the bodies from the chambers and put them in the ovens. His story is not told as most stories are. His story is told through his pictures and his son's writing. Both are horrific to witness. "Witness" is an important word in this book. Through Olere's art, the reader witnesses what he witnessed. Through Oler's words, the reader becomes a witness. The father and son force the reader to look at the horror, and not turn away.

The images are not for the faint of heart, but the faint of heart should witness this book. Everyone should witness this book. Oler writes that his father died in his eighties but not of a disease. He died from a broken heart when university professors began to deny the Holocaust altogether.

"Witness: Images of Auschwitz" is a small, terrifying book. I suggest it to anyone who thinks we should "get past" the horrors of World War II, and the events of September 11, 2001.

Quote:
"I did not survive to rewrite the history
Of the Second World War
And explain how it came about and why.
I have no idea. I have no opinions.

I survived just to show you what it is like
Every day in the camp.

I say, "What it is like," not how it was.
To me it still is. I am in it.

Every morning I start all over again from
The Hell Train on.

Every night, I struggle for my next breath
Of fresh air."
--page 26

I first saw this book when I was visiting the Holocaust Museum (in Washington) and it was equally disturbing as all the displays/exhibits in the museum. The illustrator is a very talented artist, and the author of the text was very poetic. It's an extremely powerful piece of work, both terrifying and also touching. Specifically, I remember the pictures of the phases of the gas chamber, and the text entitled something like "How Many More?" which was a prayer. An incredible book, but only for mature audiences.