Volume 39, Number 16 · October 8, 1992
Strategies of Hell
By Istvan Deak
'The Good Old Days': The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
edited by Ernst Klee, by Willi Dressen, by Volker Riess, translated by Deborah Burnstone, foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Free Press, 314 pp., $22.95
Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz
by Rudolf Höss, edited by Steven Paskuly, translated by Andrew Pollinger
Prometheus Books, 390 pp., $26.95
In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen
by Gordon J. Horwitz
Free Press, 236 pp., $22.95
Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany
by Peter Wyden
Simon and Schuster
Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin
by Inge Deutschkron, translated by Jean Steinberg
Fromm International, 262 pp., $18.95
In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen
by Nechama Tec
Oxford University Press, 279 pp., $21.95
Three years have passed since my review in these pages of fifteen books selected from the enormous Holocaust literature published during the 1980s;[1] hundreds more on the subject have since appeared. Writing about the Holocaust has become an industry in itself, one with a terrible and neverending fascination. Perhaps, however, a change is taking place in the general character of such works. While survivors' memoirs, historical accounts, and philosophical, theological, and psychological studies continue to appear, interest has been growing in previously neglected subjects, such as the experience of ordinary non-Jews who were involved in the Holocaust, whether as murderers, collaborators, bystanders, or saviors. Then, too, more writers have felt the need to discuss the fate of millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazism and to make at least passing references to other cases of genocide. It is not the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust that is being challenged but the tendency of earlier writers to remain strictly within the confines of the Jewish tragedy.
Review, 5160 words
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