Testament to the Holocaust’s Lessons

As founder of Chapman University’s Holocaust education program, Marilyn J. Harran teaches two courses a year on the subject. She’s familiar with World War II’s atrocities, and she’s heard survivors’ firsthand accounts of life and death in Nazi concentration camps.

But as a contributing author to the newly released “The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures,” she wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll the work would take on her.

“I got to where I didn’t want to get up in the morning,” said Harran, 51, a professor of religious studies and history at the university in Orange. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing it.’ You start sitting there crying at the computer.”

The purpose of “The Holocaust Chronicle” (Publications International) is “to bring the truth of the Holocaust to as many people as possible,” said Louis Weber, whose Illinois-based company published the not-for-profit book this month. Publications International also produces Consumer Guide magazine, children’s interactive books and books based on chronologies such as “A Hundred Years of the Automobile.”

Weber said that, having achieved success over the last 30 years, he decided to publish the book and distribute it as widely as possible to “create something that would give back to my people, the Jewish people, and give kind of a legacy to my kids and grandchildren.”

The 63-year-old businessman vividly recalls the European Jews who began moving into his west Chicago neighborhood in late 1945.

“We lived on the second floor, and we had a good view of 18th Street, and I remember looking out the window and seeing these people walking by,” he said. “They just stared straight ahead, like walking mummies. It kind of frightened me, and I didn’t comprehend what was going on. As I grew up, I began to understand the suffering these people went through.”

The oversized, hardcover book--765 pages and nearly 7 pounds--tells the story of the Holocaust through 1,700 photographs, illustrations and more than 250 stories covering the years 1933 through 1946. It also has a 3,000-item timeline of Holocaust-related events.

While “The Holocaust Chronicle” typically retails for $35, similar books sell for $75 to $100, but Weber felt that price range was too expensive.

“How many people are going to buy if you charge that much?” Weber said. “I’ve sold the book at a low enough wholesale price it could sell for as low as $15 to as high as $35, depending upon the merchants. . . . I’m basically selling it for what the value of the paper, printing and binding is.”

He also plans to offer international publishing rights at no charge.

The first printing was 50,000 copies, thousands of which are being given to synagogues, churches, schools and public libraries, he said. Also, a companion Web site reproduces the entire text and a revolving selection of images (https://www.holocaustchronicle.org).

“The public will be able to download not only what’s in the book, but hopefully in the future, we’ll add [updated text and images] and make this a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in knowing more about the Holocaust,” Weber said.

“It’s a museum between the covers of a book,” said John Roth, another contributing editor who is one of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars and a professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. “There is nothing quite like this book, as far as I know, anywhere in the world.” He wrote the essays that begin each chapter as well as the prologue, epilogue and some other passages.

The book’s photographs, many of which have never been published previously, came from the collections at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as other archives and private collections.

As part of her contribution to the book, Harran wrote 500 photo captions.

“Many of them were really mini-research projects to try to find out what was going on at the time, what was most meaningful about this [particular] photo and interpret it in a way that would be meaningful and engaging to someone who has little knowledge of the Holocaust,” she said.

Inspired by the black-and-white cover photo of a wide-eyed young girl found in 1945 in the typhus ward at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, Harran inaugurated a student Holocaust essay contest tied into the book’s publication.

“It just occurred to me that Mr. Weber’s goal was to get this book in the hands of young people, and what better way to connect their voices with the picture of this little girl? Here’s the young people--our future--connecting to the past in a very individual way,” Harran said.

Students at 47 high schools and middle schools in Orange County and three in Los Angeles County were asked to give the girl a voice in a 500-word essay. The 1939 Club, a Los Angeles-based Holocaust survivor organization, gave $500 prizes to the winners, Ann Shin of Imperial Middle School in La Habra and Alexandra Toumanoff of University High School in Los Angeles. They were honored March 13 at a public ceremony at Chapman University.

Harran, who hopes to make the essay contest an annual event and expand it beyond Orange County, received the club’s Teacher of the Holocaust Award in February during a ceremony honoring Weber at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Harran, whose academic background is in the 16th century Reformation, began including the Holocaust in the university’s freshman seminar program in 1987. She founded its Holocaust education program in 1994 and plans to focus the rest of her career on the Holocaust and European history during that period.

That she, a non-Jew, does so much to teach younger generations about the Holocaust amazes some of her Jewish friends, including survivors she has invited to speak on campus.

“I don’t find it remarkable,” Harran said. “That’s what we should all be talking about. This is a humanity issue, and education is critical.”

She says her experience researching and writing portions of the chronicle affected her deeply, giving her “so much more respect and awe for the survivors.

“How could you trust humanity again after this? And yet the survivors that I’ve come to be friends with and know well are [people] of enormous warmth and trust and humanity.”

Dennis McLellan can be reached at dennis.mclellan@latimes.com.