Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol. 3, 1941-1942, Jurgen Matthaus with Emil Kerenji Jan Lambertz, and Leah Wolfson. Vol. 5 in series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), xxxi + 551 pp., hardcover $55.00, electronic version available

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“All philosophizing ends at the barbed-wire fence” (p. 230). So wrote Serbian Jewish prisoner Hilda Dajč in 1942 from Judenlager Semlin, where she was soon to be murdered. Her words help explain the paucity, in this thick documentary collection, of captive Jews' interpretations of the Holocaust: cursory efforts at understanding are overwhelmed by descriptions of the “reality” that Dajč called “unsurpassable.” Her words challenge us to ponder deeply the explanatory vocabulary we employ in attempting to comprehend the tragedy. Since any discussion of the Holocaust's empirical realities requires a choice of interpretive concepts, it is inescapable that we should philosophize after the barbed wire. This book's numerous documents, some previously published but many translated from archival sources for the first time, include heart-stabbing expressions of pain, fear, despair, doomed hope, and innocent delusion. They flow mainly from Jewish sufferers' pens, with none from the perpetrators' bu

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