Ashes in the Wind

Beginning in 1940, 110,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Of those, fewer than 6,000 returned. Ashes in the Wind is a story of murder, on a scale never known before, with organised malice and forethought. It is a monumental history of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and a detailed and moving description of how the Nazi party first discriminated against Jews, before segregating them and finally deporting them to the gas chambers (a process fully outlined in the mass of administrative documents discovered by Dr Presser). At a time when there are increasingly fewer survivors of the Holocaust the eye-witness accounts and contemporary descriptions in Ashes in the Wind powerfully outline, for future generations, the process of dehumanisation, and the silent conformity by Dutch civilians, that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Using 15 years of research Jacob Presser graphically recounts stories of persecution, life in the transit camps and the process of going into hiding. In this detailed narrative, the author conveys the utter despair felt by people whose whole world had crumbled and would be destroyed.