During World War II, more than five million Jews lived under Nazi rule in Eastern Europe. The German authorities established in each ghetto a Jewish Council, or Judenrat, to maintain minimal living standards. This work analyzes situations where the Councils and ghetto police were forced to send their own communities to death.

The works of Isaiah Trunk, a historian of Polish Jewry, include "Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution". Steven T. Katz is a professor of Jewish history at Cornell University. He is the author of the three-volume work, "The Holocaust in Historical Context".