The chilling, deeply disturbing cover photograph shows hundreds of shoes: they once belonged to victims of the Nazi death camps. "And because we are only made of fabric and leather / And not of blood and flesh, each one of / us avoided the hellfire." (from "I Saw a Mountain" by Yiddish poet Moshe Szulsztein). In Bearing Witness , poems, short stories, speeches, memoirs, excerpts from novels and film scripts, and other writings on the Holocaust have been compiled to provide readers with a collection that reflects with hard and moving honesty the scope of a brutality which is difficult to comprehend yet impossible to deny. The writings speak from places of intense pain and suffering that are both physical and spiritual, and acknowledge that the tragedy of the Holocaust is a tragedy of humanity, a failing that must be born by history and attended to today. (Ages 12-16)