The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Opened in April 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., summons all who enter its portals to rise to an important and extraordinary challenge: to remember and immortalize the 6 million Jews and millions of other Nazi victims of World War II - Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, political and religious dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war - who were murdered in the most horrifying event of our time: the Holocaust. The World Must Know depicts the evolution of the Holocaust comprehensively, as it is presented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - the living memorial to the victims of the Holocaust that tells a story the world must know in the most moving and powerful visual and verbal way. Drawing on the museum's artifacts and its extensive eyewitness testimony collection, the second largest in the world, and including over 200 photographic images from the museum's collections, The World Must Know details the four major historical participants: the perpetrator, the bystander, the rescuer, and, above all, the victim. The World Must Know journeys back to a time when Jewish culture thrived in Europe, to family Shabbat dinners and joyous Passover celebrations where the lighting of the candles was done before unshuttered windows, and proceeds to that point when the most unspeakable evil in history began, and then bears witness to the most horrifying shattering of innocent lives. Starting with the rise of nazism, The World Must Know reveals the human stories of the Holocaust, documenting the range of psychological extremes from the evil of the Nazi doctors whostaffed the death camps and determined who shall live and who shall die, to the nobility of ordinary citizens, like those in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, who risked their own lives by offering their homes as havens to refugee Jews, to the horror of entire famil