Britain and the Holocaust is an edited volume assembled from papers presented at a 2009 conference organized by the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Wiener Library. Edited by Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, the book speaks to a transformation in the understanding of the Holocaust in Britain, a transformation wonderfully articulated by Andy Pearce in his recent Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain (2014). Britain and the Holocaust provides an illuminating set of studies to illustrate the trajectory of Holocaust memory in the United Kingdom. That it took until 2013 for such a publication to appear indicates the strong and enduring narratives of distancing and disconnection between Britain and the Holocaust, exemplified by George Steiner when he argued, “In Britain the Shoah has no reality, not even to the Jews” (in Stephen Brook, The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain [1989], 421). As Tony Kushner states in his chapter in this volume, “Britain's morally untarnished and unproblematic referencing of the war is potentially challenged by the increasing attention given to the Holocaust” (52). While some academics, notably Kushner, have been exploring the memory of the Holocaust in Britain since at least the 1980s, this book is testament to the burgeoning contemporary interest in this issue among historians. A major focus of recent work has been examining what the late David Cesarani suggested is the “sheer volume of talking, recording, writing, representation in various media, and publishing” that went on in the two decades after the Second World War (introduction to After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. Cesarani and Sunquist [2012], 10). Laura Jockusch's recent research has identified the “vibrant and widespread activity [that] belies the supposed silence of Holocaust survivors about their traumatic experience in the immediate wake of the catastrophe” (Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe [2012], 8), and such activity included the collection of testimonies, archival material, commemorative practices, and exhibitions.

Britain and the Holocaust adds to this important body of recent work. The first section, “Confronting the Holocaust,” is particularly strong where it recovers previously excluded voices, including Sharples's detailed investigation of the popular understanding of the Nuremburg Trials through the Mass Observation Archive, and Duncan Little's chapter on British soldiers who experienced Auschwitz and whose testimonies draw upon broader narratives of Britain at war. Soldiers' memory is a theme that Kushner also takes up in his chapter, exploring the distortions in the memoirs of British prisoners of war. These chapters explore the intimate and ongoing connections between Britain and the Holocaust, often disrupting the orthodox discursive framework of Britain at war—heroic narratives of “our finest hour”—and also disrupting the traditional understanding of the Holocaust as something that happened “over there” and had little connection to British history or geography.

The second section, “The Holocaust on Screen,” includes Tim Cole's investigation of the reaction to the screening of the American miniseries Holocaust, while James Jordan's fascinating account of the references to the Holocaust in the popular television program This is Your Life recovers the everyday referencing of the Holocaust during British primetime, albeit referencing that was still constrained within heroic narratives of Britain at war. Jensen continues this discussion of British television and film, arguing persuasively that films such as the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which are extensively used within the UK education system, allow a moral and ethical distancing on the part of the viewer, in part because they do not disrupt those heroic narratives. While the key point here is that it is precisely the use of such fictionalized accounts in classrooms that is problematic, a forced connection to British history in such films would seem to be incongruous. However, the next section of the book, “The Holocaust in Exhibitions,” provides a more explicit opportunity to connect Britain and the Holocaust: How might British museums tell these stories? All three chapters in the section deal with the representation of the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum, Britain's multisite state war museum. Antoine Capet examines the collection and display of Holocaust art at the museum; Rebecca Jinks explores the relationship between the museum's separate Holocaust and Crimes against Humanity exhibitions; and Tom Lawson provides a short but illuminating chapter on the absence of colonial genocide at the Imperial War Museum. And while Lawson does examine the representations of genocide in other museums in the United Kingdom, including the dispiriting example of Truganini's necklace on display in an Exeter Museum as late as 1997, labeled as “a pathetic relic of a vanished people” (164), the focus on the state institution does provide a partial view of the contemporary state of Holocaust exhibition making in the United Kingdom. Sharples and Jensen do not claim that theirs is a comprehensive volume, and given its origins in a conference and the choice of papers available, an overemphasis on certain sites is perhaps understandable. As the largest permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the United Kingdom, the Imperial War Museum may deserve outsized attention, but a national lens, and thus a focus on national identity, can often elide as much as it reveals. What might an analysis of the Holocaust in community museums, read in conjunction with a state perspective, reveal about the place of the Holocaust in British society? This question is all the more crucial given the comparative lateness of permanent Holocaust museums in the United Kingdom compared with, say, the much earlier opening of like museums in Canada, the United States, and Australia.

In part four, “Commemorating the Shoah,” two papers focus on particular commemorative moments: Mark Donnelly's on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, and Andy Pearce's on Holocaust Memorial Day. This section, and indeed the volume, ends with a chapter by Dan Stone that asks broader, provocative questions about the “Holocaust and/as heritage.” Taking issue with the instrumentalization of the Holocaust within a civics and citizenship agenda, including educational visits to sites of memory, Stone argues that contemporary forms of Holocaust memory, particularly contemporary commemorative forms, do not challenge orthodox conceptualizations of British national identity, flattening the historical nuances under a layer of kitsch sentimentality and avoiding a critical engagement with Britain's imperial past.

Although the chapters in this volume do much to restore the temporal texture of Holocaust memory and prompt such critical engagement, the volume can occasionally, as with the focus on the Imperial War Museum, collapse the complex geographies of Britain and the Holocaust. Nonetheless, this is an important contribution in its own right to an often overlooked area and is a very useful volume for comparative studies within other national and local contexts.