For his doctoral dissertation in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yehuda Bauer focused on the British Mandate that before Israel’s independence controlled historic Palestine.

In a conversation with Abba Kovner, the poet who had led the resistance to Nazi rule in the Vilna ghetto, the young historian said he knew there was a larger story to tell but admitted that he was fearful of taking on a subject as monumental as the Holocaust.

Kovner convinced him that there was no more important event in Jewish history and that his fear of the subject was “a very good starting point.”