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Yad Vashem is open to the general public, free of charge. All visits to Yad Vashem must be reserved in advance.

Interview With Melvin Jules Bukiet, Author and Professor, Sarah Lawrence College

On History and Fiction

  1.  In other words, because her book had exposed the evils of slavery, more people were aware of it, and it had a part in fomenting the Civil War. Apparently the story about Lincoln meeting Beecher Stowe is one of the most popular anecdotes in American literary history, though it is entirely apocryphal. See Daniel Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0030.104/--lincoln-stowe-and-the-little-womangreat-war-story-the-making?rgn=main;view=fulltext, accessed July 25, 2016.
  2. The title of the book is a cynical reference to the infamous sign over the main gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (“work sets you free”), an image of which adorns the cover.
  3. Melvin Bukiet, ed., Nothing Makes You Free (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002), p. 14.
  4. Moloch is the fire god to whom children were sacrificed, who lived in the valley of the damned.