Volume 28, Number 16 · October 22, 1981
Unspeakable News
By Neal Ascherson
Auschwitz and the Allies
by Martin Gilbert
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 368 pp., $15.95
The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution"
by Walter Laqueur
Little, Brown, 262 pp., $12.95
'Le soleil ni la mort ne peuvent se regarder fixement'—'It is impossible to stare continuously at the sun or at death.' This quotation from La Rochefoucauld has struck more than one writer about the Final Solution as appropriate. It is a merciful remark, and the literature about both the Jewish and the non-Jewish response to the Endlösung has become very much more thoughtful and merciful over the last ten years. The agonizing public quarrel over the failure of the Judenräte, the Nazisponsored Jewish administrations, to resist persecution and deportation in the European ghettos, even when the elders understood what deportation really meant, has receded into the past. The Polish nation is no longer accused of collective anti-Semitism, even of active complicity in the Holocaust, during the Nazi occupation, and there is a much wider realization of how much the Polish underground and the exile government in London did both to hinder and to publicize the fate of the Jews—Walter Laqueur observes in his book that they showed more concern than the British or American governments of the time.
Review, 2409 words
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