By: Jean-Francois Steiner Publisher: Plume Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 432 Publication Date: April 01, 1994 Studio: Plume
Jaw-Dropping . . . ^ I read this book in four days, and the last 1/3 of it in a single sitting.
The place, Treblinka was the first of the "mass-production" Jewish extermination-murder camps operated by Nazi Germany. About 800,000 Jews were murdered/buried there (then dug up and cremated to hide the crime). It operated for about a year in 1942-43 and ended in a massive, successful revolt by the inmates. Some of these survived to reveal the story of the secret place, Treblinka.
I have read a few Holocaust genre' books including non-fictional works (The Enduring Spirit, Night, The Hiding Place), and historical fiction accounts (War and Remembrance). Horrifying and heartbreaking as those were, I have never read anything quite like Treblinka, by Jean-Francois Steiner.
Treblinka is presented as a non-fictional history of what happpened the the camp. The author apparently takes license (reasonable I believe) regarding much dialogue and a few detailed situations, but reading between the lines closely, one can see that the content of the book is taken from intensively researched written and oral witness accounts. The book reads like a suspense-adventure novel. If it was indeed just a fictional novel, many would find the content objectionable. The situations are extreme.
That the author accurately decribes the hellish conditions and atmosphere of hunger, beatings, torture, and death in the camp is a given. I suspect that many readers, including myself at one time, open their first Holocaust-related history as a curious spectator taking a peek at the horror, insulated by the safe shield of time and space. However . . .
Steiner superbly helps the reader to understand more: Why did most Jews march obediently into the cattle cars with their families in tow? Why did they quietly march to the gas houses? Who were these walking skeletons (forked men) stacking rotting bodies in the mass graves, and what was their life like? (Wouk touched on them briefly in War and Remembrance). Why did the Germans expend resources operating an extermination industry when there was a (losing) war to be fought? Why the Nazi cruelty and who were these men?
You can't really get all the answers into one book, but this one is better than the field. I also very much appreciated the insight into the Jewish religious aspect (which was often key to their behaviors). Steiner did an awesome and gripping job of explaining the world of Treblinka. Very highly recommended.
A Reflective View of the Nazi German Treblinka Extermination Camp in German-Occupied Poland ^ The following review is based on the original (1967) edition. The book begins with accounts of the mass shootings of Jews by the Germans at Ponary Woods near Vilnius (Wilno, Vilna).
Common themes in this novel-like book are "Jewish passivity", affirmations and denials of faith in God, and preparations for the daring revolt. Steiner estimates that the bodies of the 700,000 murdered Treblinka Jews, prior to cremation, occupied 90,000 cubic yards and weighed 35,000 tons (p. 282). This means that the average body occupied 3.47 cubic feet and weighted 110.25 pounds.
A major factor behind "Jewish passivity" had been the deeply-ingrained pro-German orientation of most Jews. Steiner comments: "Even more than Polish Jews, they [the German Jews] had still refused to accept the reality of extermination. On this subject Ringelblum noted in his journal that the first deportees from the Warsaw ghetto referred to Hitler as unser Fuhrer. This terrible blindness lasted to the threshold of the gas chambers." (p. 164). Further east, the following was the attitude of Polish Jews living in a village near Bialystok: "At the beginning of the German occupation no one had been worried, and if it had not been for the obligation to wear a yellow star on the chest and the left shoulder, it would have been possible to believe that life would go on as it had in the past, with its great poverty, its small satisfactions, and the immense joy of Sabbath evenings." (p. 195). The foregoing adds refutation to the claim that the massive Jewish-Communist collaboration, in Soviet-conquered eastern Poland, had been motivated by Jewish fears of Nazi extermination. It is obvious that, back in 1939-1940, few Polish Jews had such fears.
Steiner touches on various issues related to prewar Polish-Jewish relations. She cites the experience of Adolf Friedman, who considered himself a "Pole of Mosaic persuasion": "He had belonged to that minority of middle-class Jews who had believed that assimilation was possible at the time of the Constitution of 1919, which made the Jews almost full-fledged citizens for the first time in the history of Poland." (p. 102)
Polish nationalists have at times accused Jews of shirking military service. Steiner confirms the validity of this accusation when she discusses its implication for the impending Treblinka revolt, albeit with the following spin: "...few Jews knew how to use a weapon. Treated as second-class citizens, massacred from time to time during pogroms, openly despised by all `good Poles', most Jews had tried, often successfully, to avoid military service. The majority had no military training." (p. 157). This also confirms the reason for relatively few Jews being admitted to the AK.
Most Holocaust materials tacitly assume that Poles were responsible for most if not all of the killings of fugitive Jews, but Steiner doesn't. After suggesting that 40 of the Treblinka escapees survived until the arrival of the Red Army (historian Yitzhak Arad estimates 70), she comments: "The others had been killed in the course of that year by Polish peasants, partisans of the Armia Krajowa [AK], Ukrainian fascist bands, deserters from the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, and special units of the German army." (p. 335). In view of the fact that Germans and Ukrainians were incomparably more prone to kill Jews than were the Poles, this takes on further significance.
Fascinating ^ It's difficult to understand how this genocide could happen without first understanding the deeply ingrained anti-Semiticsm and racial jealousy that preceded it. This book helps to illustrate that and more.
Some revisionists point to Nazi film footage of Jews wearing yellow stars playing music, eating and dancing. They say this proves that the holocaust is a hoax. In this book one can see the bitter irony of how a people of honor and humanity can kill their own brethren by day and sing and dance by night - all while in captivity, under the watchful eyes of guards who can strike them down at any moment. It's so insane that it's a challenge to explain and and comprehend and yet the book manages to capture it.
This book is also a study of humanity - from the irrational desire to survive at all costs, to the strong human characteristic of organization. Humans organized to build the pyramids, humans organized to implement the Final Solution, and humans organized the revolt at Treblinka. I'm awestruck by their courage.
Understanding How 6 Million Were Murdered ^ Any disbeliever in the Holocaust needs to began their re-education by reading this unique book. This is the finest book on the dark side of human nature and man's inhumanity to man. This demonstrates what happens when the majority turns their heads and rationalizes that what is happening to their neighbors is not their concern. Not recommended for children, but I gave this to my 15 year old granddaughter who is doing a special project in high school on the Holocaust including a visit this summer to several death camps in Eastern Europe including Treblinka.
a good novel but not accurate in many places... ^ This is a good novel, in the strictest sense. I understand it was written in the 60s, probably before or after the Treblinka trials of the 60s, but there are many inaccuracies in this book, something that has also been said by survivors like Richard Glazar and even former SS man Franz Suchomel. Ive studied this particular area of the holocaust, that is, the Operation Reinhard camps, for many years, as there is still little info o the subject, especially compared with Auschwitz/Birkenau. SS men Kurt Franz (nicknamed Lalka, meaning Doll in Polish) and Kuttner, nicknamed Kiwe by the inmates of Treblinka, are the main SS men in the story. But it wasnt Kuttner that got the name of the Angel Of Death, that was reserved for August Miete of the SS. The book does mention, of course, the murder of SS man Max Biala by a prisoner named Berliner. The book, as a novel, is good in and of itself, i just wish these novelists didnt feel the need to make up things when the truth was just as shocking, if not more shocking. I could give many examples but it would take too long. It seems the author of this book kind of had composite characters of the SS, such as calling Kuttner the Angel Of Death when that was not the case, though Kuttner was terrible in his own right. There is no mention of SS men like Hirthreiter, Willi Mentz (the gunman of Treblinka who often worked in the "filed hospital" of the camp, where some new arrivals and prisoners themselved would be shot above a pit that was almost kept lit with the help of sulfur and similar things. If you want the best accounts of the Treblinka experience, i recommend Richard Glazar's book "Trap With a Green Fence" and Samuel Willenburg's account titled "Surviving Treblinka", and the book Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, published by Indiana University. There is also the book "The Death Camp Treblinka" by Alexander Donat, which has many firsthand accounts of what when on in that place of carnage. It is not the easiest book to find, i foind it at a library years ago and i just found a copy on here that was going for nearly 200 dollars, but i will get it as soon as i get the funds. Anyway, this is a good NOVEL, as we dont know many of the dialogues that took place in the camp during lights out after a day of sorting clothes and witnessing innocents being chased down the "Road to Heaven", the fenced path that led to the building containing the gas chambers which were equipped with carbon monoxide to brutally murder those shoved in the chambers...i guess i could recommend this book, as it is good in and of itself as a novel, but there are way too many inaccracies when looking at it from a historical point of view as I do. Perhaps worst of all was the misrepresentation of some of those who perished in the camp, and who have no way of defending themselves. Get Glazar's Trap With A Green Fence and Willenburg's Surviving Treblinka, then get even more deep with books like Donat's "The Death Camp Treblinka". And Gitta Sereny's book "Into that Darkness", featuring interviews from survivors and former SS men in treblinka, most notably Franz Stangl and Franz Suchomel, and the interviews play off each other, just to confirm things that may or may not have happened in Treblinka, especially with things that these individual SS men had done or not done. But this novel Treblinka is good, i suppose, for beginners to get an understanding of the place, but there are more and better accounts of what REALLY happened in Treblinka...so there is my 2 cents. But just remember that some survivors were offended by this book, as if it were manipulated a bit. But, nonetheless, it is a good read, and once you research other aspects, you can yourself correct the inaccuricies of this book should you read it again, as I have done.
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