Variations on a Theme

TREBLINKA by Jean-Franc,ois Steiner. 415 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

There is a horrifying sameness to books about Nazi concentration camps. To have read once about Auschwitz or Belsen or Dachau ought to be enough for anyone who does not want to hide from facts. Yet each successive volume uncovers new variations on the theme of human bestiality. This fictionalized account is unusual in that it begins with the agonized if rather naive question of why the Jewish victims of the Nazis did not try to fight against their doom. It ends up--almost, it sometimes seems, against the author's intent--as an account of triumph amidst total despair.

The book ignited controversy when it was published in France (TIME, April 29, 1966), largely because Author Steiner, who is now only 29, seemed to be arguing that many Jews permitted themselves to be murdered by the Nazis without significant resistance, and that a good number of the others sent their fellow slaves to death in order to save their own lives. Steiner, whose Parisian father perished in a concentration camp, says that he felt "the shame of being one of the sons of this people." He interviewed survivors from the Treblinka death factory in Poland to re-create the horror that befell 700,000 Jews.

He did indeed find evidence (hardly new) pointing to the dubious activities of the Judenrat--the civil leaders of the ghettos, who were chosen by the Jews and who, in some cities, decided which Jews were to die and which might live. And he also describes the insanely ingenious techniques that the Nazis employed to divide and demoralize their victims. Identity cards would be issued to some Jews; the others would soon disappear. Next, new cards would be given to some of the survivors, while the remainder again would be carted away. Methods of subdividing and conquering were continued in the camps and helped transform the shrinking group of survivors into near beasts. At length came the Treblinka uprising--one of the few in any Nazi camp--and 600 prisoners escaped to a nearby forest. All but 40 were hunted down. That the uprising could happen at all in such circumstances emerges as something of a miracle of resistance.

Steiner has some odd theories about the Jews and their supposed fatalism and submissiveness. But on the whole his tone is ice-cold and almost detached. Scene after scene makes explicit what it must have been like to labor in a camp of death.

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