In a moving coda, the author of this book examines his feelings as he looks at a photograph that was taken at the funeral of his grandfather, who died in 1936 while serving as chief rabbi of Vienna. Two years later, Hitler's regime annexed all of Austria, and Feuchtwang's parents, who were then living in Berlin, fled with their one-year-old son to Rotterdam and then to London. The sense of “grievous loss” that animates Feuchtwang's book is rooted in his own family history.

He later became a professional anthropologist, and his academic training also affects the way, in 2004, he looks at that photograph of his grandfather's funeral. The photo is hung in a museum, a public space created for public commemoration. Museum-goers whom he does not know are around him. Recognizing the image of his own father in the photograph, Feuchtwang experiences some strong private feelings. None of the other people do, of course. He writes that his father, there in the photo, “is my secret.” Then Feuchtwang becomes aware of another level of privacy. He himself is the “bigger secret” in the room, because “no visitor could identify me with the picture that I secretly identify with myself” (p. 225). The anecdote is telling because much of this book is concerned with the interplay of—and sometimes profound differences between—public and private memory.

Feuchtwang begins his inquiry from the generous assumption that human responses to disaster are likely to show similarities from case to case, in spite of whatever historical and cultural differences may be involved. He chooses to compare psychological repercussions of the Holocaust with those of two other instances of protracted human suffering: the Great Leap famine in China and the annihilation campaign against resisters of the Guomindang that began in Taiwan in 1952. Feuchtwang is aware that the three cases are not similar in size or scope, but sets that issue aside because his focus is on the nature of psychological recovery (or failure to recover), not on volume of hurt. It is important that all three cases are of human-caused disaster—not natural disaster—because this opens the possibility of studying how victims and perpetrators relate.

Some of his methods and findings raise questions of whether comparison is even possible. In an interview, a therapist in Berlin who works with Holocaust survivors “launched into an offended denial that the Shoah could be compared to anything else” (p. 20). Chinese interviewees, from a different angle, thought that the Great Leap famine also was not comparable—at least not to the things to which Feuchtwang was comparing it. Feuchtwang understands these objections, but persists—correctly, in my view—on the assumption that there still must be valuable comparisons to make in how human beings absorb “grievous loss.” Here, though, a flaw in his research design appears, and I wish he had been able to avoid it. His thirty-four interviewees for the Great Leap famine case are from Quanzhou in Fujian, “not a severely affected area” but one where people “suffered acute malnutrition to the point of oedema” (p. 6). His reason for choosing a less-than-lethally-affected area seems to have been that in Quanzhou he had contacts and hence easier access to frank interviews. That is an understandable reason. Still, in order to draw comparisons with the Holocaust and the Taiwan annihilation, it clearly would have been better to find people whose relatives had starved to death.

The one significant drawback to Feuchtwang's book is that it is difficult to read. This is unfortunate, because the topic of comparative response to disaster has great potential for undergraduate teaching, and, if the book's writing were more accessible, it could be used as a textbook. The summary paragraph of the Great Leap chapter, for example, reads this way:

There is gold in this mine, but it takes a specialist with a pick to get it out. An undergraduate with a notebook would be frustrated.