ABSTRACT
I have been conscious of the danger that this book would become “unreadable”, if only because the reader would be overwhelmed by far too many names. Indeed, looking at the Index, the number of names is very large. The reader was advised (in the Preface) not to try and remember all the names, but to focus on a limited number of persons, and let them take you through the stories. To what extent this approach has been successful remains an open question, but I could not leave the names out. The basis for this intransigence goes back to my very first visit to Yad Vashem in 1974.
