Milton Meltzer's ["Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust"] is an act of desperation—an act of piety and pity, wrath and love, despair and homage; but the motive force, the terrible sense of urgency which drives and animates it, is desperation. In an afterword, he notes that an authoritative study of American high school history textbooks, conducted nearly 30 years after World War II, revealed that "their treatment of Nazism was brief, bland, superficial, and misleading," that "racism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust were ignored or dismissed in a few lines," and that textbooks designed for colleges and universities were "not substantially better." "Darkness," said the historian Golo Mann, "hides the vilest crime ever perpetrated by man against man."…

Into this infinite void Meltzer sends his book levelling it without distinction—for none should or need be made—at teen-agers and young adults who came along after the...