History: This is a small book but it packs a powerful punch. Essentially it is a chronicle of shame and pride. Shame for the Nazis and their supporters in Germany and Austria who planned and perpetrated the pogrom of November 10th, 1938.
This was the notorious Kristallnacht or night of broken glass when 91 Jews were murdered and more than 30,000 taken off to concentration camps. Murder and repression were accompanied by wholesale destruction of Jewish shops and property, including more than a thousand synagogues, in cities, towns and villages all over the Third Reich.
Shame, too, for the countries which failed to respond to the pleas of German and Austrian Jews - most of them children - seeking refuge from persecution. Without making great play of it, the author duly chronicles the fact that Ireland's door was firmly shut in their faces.
It's one of the most shameful chapters in our history. Evidence has since come to light of deep-rooted anti-Semitism at the time in our administrative system, particularly the Department of Justice. Ireland's diplomatic representative in Berlin, Charles Bewley, was also notoriously unsympathetic to the plight of the Jews.
This is the third title in a series called "Making History", focusing on dramatic moments that shaped the course of events. That dark night in November set the scene for the Holocaust.
The ostensible reason for the Kristallnacht outrages was the assassination of a junior diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, at the German embassy in Paris but the systematic nature of the attacks indicates that it was more than a spontaneous outburst and a plan had been in place for some time.
But if there is shame, there is pride too. Again and again, we are told of ordinary Germans who put themselves at great personal risk to assist Jewish friends and neighbours. And if Ireland's response to the crisis was frankly disgraceful - especially when you consider that 500 non-Jewish children were quite rightly admitted from Germany after the War - there were other countries, great and small, who opened their arms to the victims of Nazi terror.
It's not as if the events of Kristallnacht took place in secret or behind some kind of iron curtain. There were numerous representatives of the international press in Germany and the anti-Jewish outrages were widely reported.
Not the least disturbing aspect of the Nazi rampage was the fact that many of the participants were very young. The Berlin Correspondent of the News Chronicle, a British newspaper, wrote for example that one of the most "deplorable features" of the spate of attacks was the number of young boys "who gleefully took part". The British Consul General in Hamburg witnessed "some sixty schoolchildren" firing stones at the glass doors of a synagogue, over the head of a policeman and in front of 200 adult witnesses.
Nazi incitement fell upon willing ears and we are told that, as soon as they read of the Paris shooting, Viennese citizens "turned on Jews waiting at the tram stops and beat them up". In a world gone mad, irrational hatred was the order of the day.
Kristallnacht was the culmination of almost six years of anti-Jewish persecution that began when Hitler came to power. Although a very small minority - less than one per cent of the population or half-a-million people - some 12,000 German Jews died fighting for their country in the first World War.
"They were proud Germans," writes Gilbert, "bewildered to be singled out as an evil influence, and trusting that the excesses of Nazism must, in the normal evolution of things, moderate and decline."
At this stage, before the gas-chambers, the Nazis were encouraging Jewish emigration. Between Hitler's coming to power in January 1933 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, the US took in almost 200,000. Britain was second, with more than 65,000 in the same period - among them six-year-old Alfred Dubs, later to become Lord Dubs and a minister in the Northern Ireland Office at the time of the Good Friday Agreement.
A further 46,000 were admitted to British-controlled Palestine.
Five hundred Jews crossed from Germany to France by digging a tunnel beneath the border.
A survivor of the period recalls the mood among the Jewish population: "We began to live visas day and night . . . we were obsessed by visas. We talked about them all the time. Exit visas. Transit visas. Entrance visas. Where could we go?"
Not to this country anyway, which even rejected a Vatican request for the entry of a group of doctors, at least some of whom were Jewish converts to Catholicism. Some 18,000 refugees got to Shanghai and even far-off Mexico agreed to admit 100 a year, but not "Ireland of the Welcomes".
Reading this book helps one to understand why there will always be an Israel, whether some people like it or not, because the Jews can never again afford to throw themselves on the generosity of the world. In that sense, the legacy of Kristallnacht is still with us.
Kristallnacht: Prelude to Disaster By Martin Gilbert HarperCollins, 314pp. £14.99
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times