![]() ![]() ![]() Jean-Francois Steiner in Treblinka (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) describes this monster and has him killed during the heroic uprising. Which brings up one particular Ukrainian, "Ivan Grozny" (Ivan the Terrible), the operator of the tank engine that feeds carbon monoxide into the gas chamber. We don't learn much about either the Germans (whom MacMillan consistently calls "officers" even if they are enlisted men) or the Ukrainians. MacMillan is a fine writer, but this is an abhorrent book. We feel their hunger, their thirst, and their pain. But we get altogether too much of the fate of the "workers," whether they empty out boxcars, search clothing for valuables, carry bodies, extract gold teeth. There is one brief scene in which Romani Gypsies come to Treblinka, but their fate is left unclear. One disconcerting thing about Village of a Million Spirits is that the inmates of Treblinka are consistently referred to as "workers." They are never called slaves seldom called Jews (although we are always aware that they are Jews). It is the exact opposite of Richard Rashke's Escape from Sobibor (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1982) which described the breakout in minute detail and made it convincing. (Oh, if we only could have had a footnote or two!) The uprising takes place, but it is only a few pages in the body of the work. Magda's boyfriend has sold guns to the Jews. She was an interruption to the story of the uprising.Īnd then we get to the uprising itself. I did not care about the fact that Magda's water had broken, that Magda was in pain. But running parallel to the story is the tale of Magda, a Polish girl who is in labor, pregnant by the Ukrainian who suffers the finger amputation. A Jew is killed because Kurt Franz thinks the Jew has been cruel to his dog. You are taken to the "Hospital," a place for murder. You die tomorrow if is there is a mark on your face, so the Germans always hit the Jews in the face. Overhanging the story is the inevitability of death. You can actually feel the pain, hear the screams because MacMillan is a very good writer who can tell a story in a few words. One particularly gruesome scene involves the cutting off of a Ukrainian guard's finger with a hedge clipper. The horrors keep occurring and one is worse than the previous: rape, torture, murder. In point of fact, the book is a catalog of ugly scenes that could have been written by the Maquis de Sade. Although the book's subtitle refers to the Treblinka Uprising, the book is neither about the uprising nor about what actually happened to the survivors who escaped. ![]() I did not use them in my two historical novels. I was unaware that a novelist could use footnotes until I read Erdman. The reader cries out: "Where did MacMillan get this idea from? Were there such luxury trains from Vienna in October 1942?" The reader is left wondering, having to trust that MacMillan has written a historical novel that deals honestly with history even if all the characters except Kurt Franz are fictional. The book screams for a treatment like Erdman's.įor example: We all know about the shipment of people packed tightly together in boxcars, but MacMillan also describes a luxury train from Vienna, on which the passengers, described as rich Jews, drink champagne. But, unlike Paul Erdman's books about Switzerland's role in the Holocaust, MacMillan provides no footnotes. In the interview that follows his story he says he has not talked to anyone who was at Treblinka and has never been there. What emerges is a disturbingly human portrait of a man who sacrificed his morals for his ambition, and who only at the end of his life confronted his guilt.MacMillan's book is a novel. Sereny plumbs Stangl’s conscience in an attempt to understand how a courteous, intelligent man could have overseen so many deaths and, as one of his prison guards in Düsseldorf said, “consent to remain alive” (82). The book revolves around Sereny’s extensive interviews with Stangl and a host of other people connected to Treblinka, including Stangl’s wife, Theresa, former SS guards, and survivors. The Austrian-born Sereny was both an investigative journalist and biographer who, after World War II, worked for the United Nations reuniting children who had been kidnapped by Nazi Germany with their families. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience is journalist Gitta Sereny’s 1974 biography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka Nazi extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, who was convicted for the murders of 900,000 people.
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