The Final Solution

Final Solution” is not an account that will find favor in the new Eastern Europe. Dividing many of his chapters into one slow year at a time, Cesarani achieves a sense of profound claustrophobia by tracing the extreme difficulty of hiding without being caught, blackmailed, denounced and handed over to the Germans in most of occupied Eastern Europe. In Poland, he writes, “village elders, mayors, police officials, firemen, forest rangers and upstanding citizens all took part in Jew-hunts and sought to profit from the mythical wealth of the Jews.” So too did sections of the resistance and…