Holocaust Landscapes is a book of genuine originality and imagination. The theme is the places of the Holocaust, the Holocaust as place-making event for both perpetrators and victims. Through special concepts such as distance and proximity, Professor Tim Cole tells the story of the Holocaust through a number of landscapes where genocide was implemented, experienced, and evaded--many of which have subsequently been forgotten in the post war world. Drawing on survivor's narratives, Holocaust Landscapes moves between a series of ordinary and extraordinary places and the people who inhabited them throughout the years of the Second World War.

Starting in Germany in the late 1930s, the book shifts chronologically and geographically westwards, ending in Germany in the final chaotic months of the war. These landscapes range from the most iconic (synagogue, ghetto, railroad, camp, attic) to less well known sites (forest, sea mountain, river, road, and displaced persons camp). Holocaust Landscapes provides a new perspective surrounding the shifting geographies and stories of this dark period in world history.