The events of the Holocaust remain 'unthinkable' to many men and women, as morally and intellectually baffling as they were half a century ago. Inga Clendinnen challenges our bewilderment. She seeks to dispel what she calls the Gorgon effect: the sickening of the imagination and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when we try to confront the horrors of this history.

Clendinnen explores the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' point of view. She discusses the remarkable survivor testimonies of writers such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo, the vexed issue of 'resistance' in the camps, and strategies for understanding the motivations of the Nazi leadership. She focuses an anthropologist's precise gaze on the actions of the murderers in the police battalions and among the SS in the camps.

And she considers how the Holocaust has been portrayed in poetry, fiction, and film.