What Was the Holocaust? Paperback – Illustrated, June 19, 2018

My daughter and I love to read together at bedtime still, and now that she is older the books she is interested in have more complex topics. This book was a natural next option after she read the Who Was Anne Frank book. This book about the Holocaust presents the facts of what happened to the Jewish people and others not in Nazi favor in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. While there was plenty left out in what many victims endured and suffered at the hands of the Nazi's, the cruel facts of the genocide are not sugar coated while being presented in a very age appropriate way. Photos that are included do not show the worst of the worst, but definitely depict the suffering and cruelty.If I am making this sound terrible, it's because the Holocaust is terrible. The book does an excellent job of telling the story and introducing this time in our history for kids aged 9-12. Like many in the Who Was/Is series it is a great launching pad to begin learning more about an important historical time.

This was sad learning how the Dictator caused mortality of 12 million people including 6 million Jews.

Every accurate review of what happened during German Holocaust. I’m 74 yrs old and remember very completely being taken to a commercial theater in the early ‘50 by my father a Vet to see what was encountered when the Americans arrived at the Concentration camps and ovens. Throughout my life I’ve meet people with their numbers tattooed inside their wrists. If they could talk about what they had endured it made you sick to here such HELL!Never again and now we have it going again this time within our borders.

I was impressed by the way the authors tackled this sensitive topic. It is still not an easy read, so I would not recommend this to kids under 4-5th grade (especially since the school curriculum does not touch on this topic or this war at all, so it’s quite a leap for them to try and grasp the enormity of the war and horrendous consequences). It is engaging and will provoke some deep conversations, so I suggest parents read it first and prepare for questions that will follow.

A good, honest explanation of the Holocaust. My 7 year old learned a lot from it. I thought the caricature-style “large headed” drawings of the prisoners on the front was a little off-putting and seems odd, though. I know that’s how all the illustrations in this series are drawn, but for this particular book, it almost seems inappropriate for them to be drawn in a goofy way.

My 8 year old loves these books so much, we’ve worked most of our homeschooling around them. It’s very common for boys to be more interested in non-fiction titles so I’m very happy to have these books for him. They are a very quick read so he averages two a day but he’s also a bookworm. We have our own little library of this series at home and can’t wait for more titles!

my 10 year old read this and was ok but for a young child this book could be traumatizing. I suggest this for mature kids who realize this is history and we learn it so it doesn't repeat itself.

This is such a difficult topic to discuss with children and I found this book to be extremely helpful. It also sparked a big interest in World War II with them and they keep relating information they learned from this book to new information they are learning. I really felt that this book was an age appropriate book and introduction into such a large topic for my kids.