This is a book that was given to me by a friend from Switzerland, and it has taken me 5 years to finally attain the discipline to read it because a) it's about a period in history so heinous that it's hard to read about, and b) it's in French, and my French is pretty "pathetique."
In any case, reading in French made some of the horrors less horrible. There seems to be a barrier to one's complete immersion in a book when one must focus a bit on the construction of the sentences and there's the more-than-occasional word that one (ok, I) don't understand.
The Goldsteins' story is quite compelling. Shocking that humanity can be degraded to such an extent that such a thing as the Holocaust could take place. Goldstein pulls no punches: not all Germans are painted as evil, some of the prisoners adopted the sadism of their captors, and the prejudices of some of the French are also documented.
A nice companion piece to this book might be "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink, which calls into question whether our "humanity" can cause us to submit to authority and hence, allow us to carry out the cruelties of the few in power. A remaining impression I had was that such a thing could indeed happen again, given humanity's lassitude, willingness to accept the status quo, ability to scapegoat other people for their own and society's problems, and our tendency to be led down the easiest path rather than the moral one.