Editorial Reviews
Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (1985)
“In Boulevard des Misères, Jacob Boas has provided a moving account of the victimization of Dutch Jews…. Mr. Boas provides masterly sketches of Westerbork prisoners. Henry L. Mason, New York Times, October 20, 1985.
“This is an excellent, well-written, and pioneering history recommended for the historian and general reader.” Library Journal (July 1985)
“A valuable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” Booklist, April 15, 1985.
We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (1995)
Holocaust survivor Boas bears powerful witness to what happened to ordinary families as they were crowded into the ghettos, persecuted, and murdered.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“The cumulative effect of the five journals is overwhelming.” —The Horn Book Magazine
“Boas brilliantly unfolds the history of the Holocaust through poignant excerpts from five teenagers' wartime diaries, enhanced with skillful commentary.” —Publishers Weekly
“A riveting collection of texts that, rather than variations on a theme, remain stubbornly individualistic, adding up to a stereoscopic vision of the Holocaust.” —Kirkus Reviews
“We are privy to the thoughts of five adolescents who wrote about, and then died because of, the Nazis' persecution of the Jews.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Starred Review
“Boas ably guides the reader through these literary landscapes of hell, where none of the writers survived. . . . [These] young people make the accounts more universal, and permit us to see the common humanity of each of these different witnesses.” —Jewish Bulletin
Writers’ Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935(2016)
“The book is exceptionally well-written and well-researched, drawing on an impressive variety of sources, both published and unpublished, in Russian, French, German, Dutch, English, and Spanish. What emerges is a captivating portrait of the state of European intellectual life in the 1930s.” Modern Language Review