How It Was in Vienna

NIGHT FALLS ON THE CITY by Sarah Gainham. 572 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

When the major novel about the Nazi terror is written, its theme will almost certainly be not physical brutality but moral decay. Night Falls on the City merely anticipates the probability. Some of the animal savagery is there, and the death and suffering, but what is even more shameful is the almost total collapse of human decency in a highly civilized--perhaps overcivilized--society. Author Gainham knows Austria well, and the Viennese victims, fence sitters, Nazi bullyboys, happy collaborators and German overlords are all convincing enough for documentary purposes. Almost predictably, her heroine, a famous actress, has a Jewish husband, and the terrifying things that happen when she hides him in a dummy room keep a thread of suspense.

This is a novel that anyone who was in Austria during the war or just after it could have jotted down from ordinary conversation and observation. It captures the slow fading of Austria's old escapist, professional charm before Nazi reality. It details the deportations, the mean spying for the Nazis by willing people of all classes, the fear of speaking openly, the people carted off for no known reason. Through the use of rather contrived plot coincidences, Author Gainham keeps her selected characters in view at all times, or at least until the SS and finally the Russians take care of them in their own way. Of an earlier book, Appointment in Vienna, a critic wrote that "Miss Gainham knows neither when nor how to stop." True enough. But the steady march of moral disintegration under pressure in her chief characters shows that she knows where tragedy lies.

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