If soldiers broke into your house, put a gun to your head and asked you, "Where is your father?" what would you say?

Ann Shore, a Jewish girl who lived in Zabno, Poland, in 1929 answered, "I don't know." The soldiers searched her house, found her father, and shot him on the spot.

Ann's story is told in Howard Greenfeld's book, After the Holocaust, a historical work set in the 1930's and 1940's. It is a surprisingly detailed collection of maps, photographs and stories of real people who went through horrible situations.

Greenfeld writes about the Holocaust in a way that is amazing. You hear the whole story from beginning to end about each person, and you will get so into it you will just ask for more. The way Greenfeld tells the story you can imagine you were there at the time.

The Holocaust means "destruction by fire." During the Holocaust, people were imprisoned, taken to concentration camps, experimented on or killed. Although the Holocaust targeted mostly Jews, it also exterminated Gypsies, Soviet soldiers, homosexuals and physically and mentally disabled people.

The person who was responsible for the Holocaust was Adolf Hitler, who wanted to kill all the Jewish people. There were 8 million Jews living in Europe at the time, and at the end of the Holocaust 6 million of them were murdered.

The characters in Greenfeld's book tell their stories as they reflect on their childhood. For instance, George was an 11-year-old boy who moved into the ghetto in 1942. Ghettos were places were Jewish people were taken to live. The apartment buildings were close together and were filthy and didn't have running water or working toilets. One day German soldiers did a line-up in the ghetto, and they ordered some people to the left and others to the right. Although George returned to the ghetto, his older brother marched off in the opposite direction - to his death.

George's story continues as he is shipped to another camp. He remembers the day he was liberated.

"I was looking around in garbage pails, and suddenly I saw a German soldier's rifle… I walked over to him and asked him in German if I could have a slice of bread. He said, 'Why don't you walk over there to the tank? These are Americans.'(They were actually British, but the soldier didn't know that.) …and he will give you some bread."

I learned more information and facts from this book about the Holocaust than I already knew. I learned about people's stories and the survivors who lived to tell it. As an author, Greenfeld really gets into the time period he is writing about. In an interview with Publisher's Weekly, he said, "I read everything I can get hold of on all my subjects and talk to everyone who knew them, literally saturate myself in their lives and times, even though I use only a fraction of what I read. I have to know the people I'm writing about and to care about them. I couldn't do it any other way."

I wanted to read After the Holocaust because I think it's fascinating to learn about things in the past. Reading this book, you can see how people treated others. And you can see how we as humans looked over religion and color.

I would recommend this book to kids ages 12 and up because of the extreme violence, and because younger readers might not understand words like 'anti-Semitism.'

copyright 1/17/03