Holocaust Journey is the story of Gilbert's group of thirteen travelers -- including Jews and non-Jews, a German woman, and a survivor of several Polish slave labor camps. Along the way, from Auschwitz to Treblinka, they share feelings, responses, and struggles to understand the meaning of Shoah; their voices become an extraordinary chronicle of discovery. With these experiences and reactions, Gilbert juxtaposes the stories of Holocaust victims and survivors from the ghettoes and camps, on the run from Nazi terror or in revolt against it, in a rich sampling of diaries, letters, and memoirs uncovered in painstaking archival research and, in some cases, revealed here for the first time.

Gilbert, an original and accomplished historian, skillfully interweaves present-day experiences, personal memories, and historical accounts, In Aachen, Germany, for example, a Jewish resident tells of his memories of Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes and businesses were burned and looted. By a roadside in Slovakia, Gilbert reads from one man's memoir of his escape from Auschwitz. At the front gate of Belzec, a Polish concentration camp that was the site of 600,000 murders, he reads from the recollections of a Nazi officer horrified by the savagery. More than fifty photographs taken over the course of this unique voyage are included, among them shots ofBerlin, at the spot of the 1933 book burning; the railway line to Auschwitz; Oskar Schindler's factory in Cracow, Poland; and memorial stones from Treblinka. Together with fifty-five maps, these illustrations add an arresting visual dimension to this unique and powerful story.

Holocaust Journey traces the vivid, immediate, and all too real legacy of Shoah through history and personal witness, fact and emotion. Martin Gilbert's latest book is a landmark in Holocaust history.