Dan Stone's important book shows that the liberation of the concentration and extermination camps at the end of the Holocaust was not a singular event. Rather, it was a long and agonizing process that was traumatic for the liberated and the liberators, though in understandably different ways. Following from the growing validation of memory as a historical source, which, in turn, has led to a concomitant growth in oral history projects, Stone's book is based largely on the testimony of Holocaust victims and their liberators; the perspective of both is particularly enlightening, given that most works tend to focus on one or the other group, rarely both. When allied soldiers entered the camps, they encountered a situation for which they were unprepared. They were not only astonished and traumatized by what they saw, but also overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims in critical need of medical condition. In the Belsen camp alone, there were thirty-two thousand prisoners who desperately needed help. Though some survivors criticized the medical care they received, Stone asserts that, overall, the care provided “was extraordinary given that the war was still going on and given the massive obstacles that stood in the way” (105).

Holocaust victims faced innumerable difficulties after liberation. Those too ill to leave the camps had to accept the liberators as new authority figures, and the transition was difficult. As Stone notes, “most of the survivors… continued to behave as if they were under SS guard… shrinking from authority figures, hardly daring to believe that the food and drink offered to them was real” (93). A return to normalcy was anything but easy upon recovery, for liberation did not automatically cure former captives of the trauma they had suffered. One survivor aptly noted that although he was no longer a prisoner, he still felt encompassed by the atmosphere of the camp. And as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi observed, “for us the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled… we felt nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past” (44). To make matters worse, upon liberation, victims must have sensed or guessed that their family members had not survived the war. Moreover, life after liberation also meant dealing with the pain of going forward without the love and support of those relatives and friends who had perished. “What will I do now?” Nechama Epstein Kozlowski asked, “I have remained alone, without a home, without a father and without a mother. And now freedom. What did I survive for?” (59) Indeed, for Haim Rosenfeld, who was seventeen when liberated from Dachau, survival meant that even though one horrific episode in his life had ended, he was now at the threshold of what he referred to as “my second tragedy” (89)—the loss of his family.

The liberators were slow to appreciate the fact that the Jews had been singled out for extermination. Though the Soviets duly reported the horrors they discovered at Majdanek extermination camp in Pravda, the Soviet communist party newspaper, the report “soon fell into obscurity thanks to the Soviets’ tendency to downplay Jewish suffering in favour of working class anti-fascism” (38). And in the West, “sometimes the same people who had reported during the war on rumours that the Nazis were murdering the Jews… were unable to connect those reports with what they now saw at war's end” (70). Even more disheartening is Stone's observation that surviving Jews in Poland “had to be guarded by Soviet soldiers for fear of local gentile Poles attacking them” (63).

Liberation thus meant illness, doubt, loss of family and home, and a lack of appreciation of the degree to which Jewish survivors had suffered. Unable or unwilling to go home, Jews were herded into camps for displaced persons (DP's), some for months or even years. As Stone notes, “the very existence of DP camps seemed to contradict the notion that their inhabitants had been liberated” (146). Though they certainly received better treatment, they were still dependent on British and American authorities, who provided them with their means of survival. They nonetheless rebuilt their lives in the camps: young adults married and began new families, children attended camp schools, and camp theaters and synagogues provided a semblance of normal life. Many wished to go to Palestine, but saw this dream delayed by American, British, and Soviet wrangling over the future of the British mandate.

Though much has been written about how Nazi victims were brought to the camps and about what happened during their imprisonment, little has been said about what they experienced and felt during their first months and years of freedom, or about what they had to endure to rebuild their lives. Stone's account is meticulously researched and clearly written, and tells a fascinating story that fills an important gap in the historiography of the Holocaust. The testimonials that Stone has assembled go well beyond the familiar images and photographs of concentration and extermination camp victims who are dead or barely alive. When liberators entered Dachau, they saw the dead “lying on the living and the living on the dead” (111). This and other first-hand accounts in the book make it clear that pictures may speak a thousand words, but in this book, it is the words of the liberators and survivors that evoke countless images of horror. In so doing, they foster appreciation for what Holocaust victims had to endure in order to survive and ultimately persevere.