Book excerpt: For the Jewish people, the span of years from 1933-1945, represents one of the most devastating in their three-thousand year history. It is often called in Hebrew Shoah, which is best translated as "devastation." The Roma and Sinti peoples named it the Porrajmos, the "great devouring." In English it has come to be referred to as the Holocaust, an expression that implies not only the utter terror and destruction of that time but the uniqueness of the expereience.