Richard Evans reviews a half-dozen new books about Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, some of which help to clear up lingering popular misconceptions. One such book, Evans writes, is Dan Stone’s The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath:

As Stone notes in his engrossing and illuminating book—the first full and comparative study of the subject—the fact that the extermination camps were located in the East for a long time skewed public perceptions in the West. When the Soviets liberated the major death camps, they found relatively few inmates left, either because they were dead or because they had already been evacuated by the Nazis. Thus the great majority of survivors were in camps liberated by the western Allies, and it was their stories that created the image by which the camps were long after known. The Soviet regime did not encourage its troops to talk openly about what they found, and it presented Nazi atrocities as crimes against the citizens of Eastern Europe, not specifically against Jews. In the immediate postwar years the extermination camps and the genocide against the Jews were generally pushed to the margin of public consciousness.

Stone usefully points out that liberation was not always a matter of Allied troops arriving at camp gates to be greeted by cheering inmates; there were many more prosaic encounters, particularly away from the main centers, when prisoners simply walked away, while in some places German prisoners were rearrested by suspicious Allied soldiers on their arrival. Liberation was also a gradual process, as survivors readjusted to normal life, were transferred to displaced persons camps, or decided what to do with the rest of their lives. Many were unable to recover despite the efforts of Allied medical personnel. Others felt guilt and shame at having survived, or began a desperate search for missing relatives who in all likelihood had perished.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.