Historical accounts of tragedies such as the Holocaust often allow readers and students a certain detachment in the formidable but impersonal catalogue of numbers, events, policies and processes. Gerald Green's novel Holocaust, which is based on his teleplay for the 1978 NBC miniseries, seeks to put faces on the tragedy by telling the story of the experience of two German families whose lives intersect at certain points. The Dorfs are "good" Germans, loyal to the new Nazi regime, and their son Erik, a promising lawyer, finds his ambitions realized in the SS at the side of the ruthless Reynard Heydrich. The Weiss family is Jewish, also seemingly "good" Germans, but doomed under the new regime and its determination to exterminate the Jewish population.