http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-556418.mp3
Albany, NY – Sixty years later, the Holocaust still horrifies us in large part because of the mass systematic extermination that took place. Yet, at the same time, it's because there were so many victims that today we have a hard time grasping the enormity of the event.
Bard Professor Daniel Mendelsohn has just come out with a new book that helps personalize the tragedy. It's called, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million." In it, he takes the reader on a quest to find out what happened to his own Polish relatives during WWII.
In the 2nd part of Susan Arbetter's interview with Mendelsohn, they talk about an observation his friend and traveling companion Froma made to him. From said that, "The Holocaust is so enormous that it's easy to think of it as something mechanical and anonymous, but everything that happened happened because someone made a decision... to pull a trigger, to betray, to hide or help, and that brings the scale of the tragedy down to a single person. Susan asked Daniel about that statement.