Beginnings
Impediments
Witnessing
Resisting
Inside the Grey Zone : the Auschwitz Sonderkommando
Leaders
The Men in the Green Tunics : the Order Police in Poland
The Auschwitz SS
Representing the Holocaust

More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for many as unthinkable as they were at their first rumouring. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the "Gorgon effect": the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust. Searching, eloquent and elegantly written, her book is an uncompromising attempt to extract the comprehensible from the unthinkable