Beyond Remorse

BREAKING POINT (92 pp.)--Jacob Presses-World ($2.50).

How much inhumanity can a man bear to inflict on his fellow men before his conscience calls a halt? The answer to this question is the substance of a harrowing little novel from Holland that combines the impact of a documentary film with the prodding of a remorseless sermon. The scene is Westerbork, a concentration camp in occupied Holland, from which Jews were sent on to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other extermination centers in Eastern Europe. The book's real heroes and villains are Jews, while the Nazis are seen only as almost impersonal agents of evil.

Jacques Henriques, the narrator, goes to Westerbork before he has to. A high-school teacher, he goes because he has the offer of a job with the "Disposition Service," the Jewish organization within the camp that really runs the grisly show for the Germans in charge. His boss is Siegfried Israel Cohn, a German Jew with years in concentration camps behind him, whose sense of self-preservation is so strong that he is prepared to outdo his masters in brutality. Carefully he explains to his new young "adjutant" that though all the Jews will reach Auschwitz in the end, the disposition crew will be the last to go. Each week a train leaves with its quota of victims. To postpone their fate a week, people are willing to pay huge sums. Women pay with their bodies, and Siegfried Cohn grandly takes his pick. Young Henriques catches on fast. Soon he is spying on the prisoners. He sees his own mother packed aboard, though he does manage to get her "a good seat between the water cask and the cask for excrement." He leads his own former students to their death, carries the girl he loved in his own arms to her place on the train.

Though indifferent to religion, Henriques is finally done in through his regard for a gentle religion teacher. Jeremiah Hirsch endures his fate better than most because he believes that even in Westerbork he walks with God. He reads his Bible, forces hatred from his heart and mind, achieves the near-impossible article of faith that even the Nazis are his brothers. Cynically at work saving his own skin, Henriques is yet fascinated by Hirsch's stubborn spiritual strength. On the day Hirsch and his family are led to the train, all the suppressed guilt in Henriques boils to the top. Through a single act of revenge (toward Cohn) and kindness (toward Hirsch), Henriques forfeits his life. In a desperate effort to expiate his sins, he writes the confession which is Breaking Point--and he writes hurriedly, because he is on the list for the next train to Auschwitz.

Author Presser, 58, himself a Jew and a professor of history at Amsterdam University, lost his first wife in an extermination camp, lived in hiding in Holland until war's end. What he has written is not a horror novel, despite its horrible theme. It is, rather, a deeply moving story of the terror that lies beyond remorse for the man who fails himself by failing others.

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