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Laqueur dislikes the very word Holocaust: holokaustein means to bring a burnt offering, and "it was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind, and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim." Still, the term has entered the world's vocabulary (der Holocaust has been naturalized in German), and survivors themselves employ it. The Holocaust Library, distributed by Schocken Books, for instance, is a nonprofit publishing enterprise created and managed by refugees. Most of the titles belong to the literature of testimony—The Holocaust Kingdom by Alexander Donat (361 pages; $8.95, paperback) typically records the last days of the Warsaw ghetto and the will of a child to appeal the world's sentence of death. The Politics of Rescue by Henry L. Feingold (416 pages; $7.95, paperback) revives the long-dormant question: How could the democracies of the West refuse to admit people whose need for sanctuary was a matter of life and death? In this expanded and updated edition, Historian Feingold sifts through the memorandums of state departments to find that guilt lay not only with insensitive agencies and nations but with some American Jewish organizations, which were aroused too late. "We fell victim to our faith in mankind," recalls library Editorial Chairman Alexander Donat, "our belief that humanity had set limits to the degradation and persecution of one's fellow man." Ghetto Diary by Janusz Korczak (191 pages; $8.95) is the most disturbing of the library volumes. Of the hundreds of memorial stones at Treblinka, only one bears a name: Korczak, a physician, author and head of an orphanage, who, given a chance to escape, chose to accompany his little charges to the gas chambers. The Holocaust Library also tells more heartening tales. Their Brothers' Keepers by Philip Friedman (232 pages; $4.95, paperback) celebrates the Christians who helped thousands of Jews escape because their consciences clamored louder than jackboots and guttural orders.
With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest by Per Anger (191 pages; $8.95) is a tale of transcendental heroism set against the flames of Eastern Europe. A member of the Swedish Foreign Office in Budapest, Wallenberg continually furnished Jews with false papers and helped them flee to neutral territories, sometimes only hours before the Germans arrived. Although he saved tens of thousands, Wallenberg could not save himself. He was arrested by the Soviet troops entering Hungary and vanished into another kind of gulag. His fate is unknown today, and his monument is this sadly abbreviated biography.