Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Making History Series)

Poignant and powerfully moving

Martin Gilbert has assembled the perfect cast for this historical drama. If history did not testify to the truth of these woeful events they would truly seem as an authors fiction. But within these pages we are taught better than to entertain such a thought. These unbelievable events truly happened and Gilbert has made that perfectly and irrefutably clear. With each and every changing story of personal suffering you are left in amazement until yet another testimony amazes you even more. If you are no true student of history in its grittiest presentation, don't read this book.

Not to be enjoyed not to be ignored

Martin Gilbert's prose is gripping. Do not start this book until you have time to complete the first one or two chapters. But, do not expect that upon completion you will have enjoyed the experience. Throughout Gilbert piles one story upon another and only at the end does the reader understand that the frustration with the book is not about whether it is good history, it is Gilbert's way to teach the reader just a tiny taste of what it had to be like as a Jew in Germany from 1938 to 1945. Nothing can prepare us for an experience where everything we have been taught growing up is simply not enough. Serving a country, doing well in school, being religious, raising a family, paying taxes -- none of it was enough to avoid the horrors of this beginning of the Holocaust. As I put the book down I realized I would never be the same but, I wondered what it must have been like for those who survived Kristallnacht to realize the world would never be the same? To realize that nothing they did, or did not do, would awaken them from a nightmare disturbed only occasionally by the sound of broken glass.

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No text was provided for this review.