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A searing, stunning look at Holocaust Poland

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“No Resting Place: Holocaust Poland” achieves searing power to illuminate the dark burning reality of Nazi concentration camps in Poland. Merely holding this volume burns the eyes and mind.

Rick Halperin, director of Southern Methodist University’s Embrey Human Rights Program, and program photographer Sherry Aikman have documented the horror of Poland’s darkest corners — Auschwitz, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen and other camps — through both the ineffable bestiality reflected on the sites and in how Embrey program pilgrims were transformed by the experience of visiting them during winter tours led by Halperin.

Poignant photographs bursting large across the oversized volume’s pages bring readers painfully close to the artifacts, architecture, and arrhythmia of life and death in Hitler’s centers of mass murder.

For the generation that insists we shall never forget, this volume will help the next generation that will find it too easy to forget — easy that is, until they turn the heavy pages of this mind-singeing tome. Filled with gripping photographs that record hell as it now appears decades later, we are simultaneously transported into hell as it was. The bunkers, barracks and bulging monuments of genocide can offer testimony as potent as any survivor.

“No Resting Place: Holocaust Poland” captures the nature of evil, and how its darkness can survive the generations in stillness.

“No Resting Place: Holocaust Poland,” by Rick Halperin and Denise Gee, photographs by Sherry Aikman, SMU Embrey Human Rights Program/Terrace Partners, 168 pages, 206 color images, $39.95. Edwin Black is the author of “IBM and the Holocaust,” “Nazi Nexus” and “The Farhud.”