Is there a book big enough to elucidate or explain genocide on a mass scale? We can read about facts and figures, but the human toll is impossible to take in all at once. If there is any way to understand the mass murder of millions of human beings, it is in small doses or glimpses of the horror from the viewpoint of individuals. Snapshots of genocide, rather than great, over-arching tomes that seek to explain the inexplicable. The most effective works of art about the subject of the holocaust, in which an estimated 11 million people were put to death, have been movies like Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants, and books like Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, which tell an individual story about the holocaust’s impact on one person. I Truly Lament, by focusing on the dark details and even minutia of genocide, personalizes the horror and…
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