This is the final volume of a remarkable undertaking. Since 1968, the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, a private organization of scholars and writers without an institutional base, has managed to produce three volumes of thorough essays covering the history of Jewish communities in the lands of modem Czechoslovakia (in her pre-1938 borders, i.e. including Subcarpathian Ruthenia) from the middle of the 19th century to the Communist take-over in 1948. The result is a work to which all future historians of Czechoslovak Jewry, and indeed of Czechoslovakia, will have to refer.

The first two volumes, published in 1968 and 1971, dealt with pre-1939 developments and set out the complex nature of Jewish tradition and life under the Habsburgs and during the twenty years of the first Czechoslovak Republic. Czechoslovak Jewry was a very heterogeneous phenomenon, divided along linguistic, religious, cultural and political lines. Some of these divisions, such as those between the so-called ‘assimilationists’ and Zionists, are frequently mentioned in the present volume, but the overriding topic here is the Holocaust in all its aspects - Nazi policy, Jewish reactions and the attitudes of non-Jews. It is in fact the first comprehensive one-volume treatment of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia in any language.

Livia Rothkirchen sets the framework in an introductory study dealing with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the extension of Nazi persecution of the Jews to the Bohemian lands, the attempts of Jewish organizations to cope with the new situation, and the Czech fascists (whose role in political life was random and whose advice on how to solve the ‘Jewish question’ the Nazis did not need). John G. Lexa supplements this with a detailed survey of anti-Jewish laws and regulations introduced in the German ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia'. Zdenek Lederer's contribution describes life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Ladislav Lipscher writes about the fate of Jews in the semi-independent Slovak state and Erich Kulka records the final stage of the Holocaust - the deportations to the extermination camps.

Most of these topics have been dealt with elsewhere (in some cases by the same authors).