The Atrocity of Hunger focuses on the Jews in the Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters,' and denied them sufficient food for survival. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors.

Helene Sinnreich is head and professor of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She serves as co-editor-in-chief of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press).  Dr. Sinnreich has served as a fellow the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., at the Institute of Advaned Study at Central European University in Budapest, and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.