Volume 8, Number 10 · June 1, 1967
Chronicles of the Holocaust
By Neal Ascherson
Treblinka
by Jean-François Steiner, Preface by Simone de Beauvoir
Simon & Schuster, 416 pp., $5.95
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski
Pocket Books, 213 pp., $.95 (paper)
They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe
edited and translated by Yuri Suhl
Crown, 328 pp., $5.95
Resistance Against Tyranny
edited by Eugene Heimler
Praeger, 168 pp., $5.95
The Murderers Among Us: The Wiesenthal Memoirs
by Simon Wiesenthal, edited by Joseph Wechsberg
McGraw-Hill, 340 pp., $6.95
It was Jeanne Moreau, drawing down the corners of her mouth, who spoke of the holiday crowds at Saint-Tropez; each winter-pale body turning gold in the sun and each pair of hands grasping the covers of Treblinka. At first in France, and now in Britain, Germany, and the United States, the signs of a best seller have appeared. Tens of thousands of people who will never read Hilberg or Reitlinger or the West German trial reporting, who have never visited a concentration camp, never seen a documentary film about one, nor met a survivor, will now form their impression of the Final Solution from this. Jean-François Steiner's documentary novel will from now on become the general reference for 'the camps,' as The Diary of Anne Frank and its dramatizations became ten years ago the general reference for the tragedy of the innocent individual under the Thousand-Year Reich. Therefore the first question to be asked about Treblinka is not 'is it a good book?' nor even 'is it a genuine novel?' though I think it is neither, but: Is it accurate?
Review, 2942 words
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