BOOKS
They look for a place
to sit and eat -
no meaning,
no point.
475
They? Us? Tremendous tact anyway in avoiding crudely pointful
stresses. . . . In the end, I suppose, these voices do converse.
G. S.
Fraser
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN
TREBLINKA. By
Jean-Francois Steiner. Simon
&
Schuster.
$5.95.
Too much discussion of behavior under Nazi persecution has
been focused on "Jewish character" and not enough on the more
general question of twentieth-century holocaust. Yet concentration camp
survivors have much in common with atomic bomb survivors I have
worked with in Hiroshima, despite the very great differences in the
two experiences. One way to move beyond the confused polemic that
has surrounded the still disturbing issue of Jewish response to the Nazi
program of extermination is to relate it to the psychology of massive
death immersion. Such a perspective helps us to approach J ean-Francois
Steiner's alternatingly brilliant and misleading account of a "model death
camp" and of the rising of its inmates in armed rebellion.
In first depicting the Jews' failure to resist being herded off to
Treblinka, Steiner emphasizes their historical conditioning through
persecution in Lithuania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe ("Suffering
was their business"), as well as the deceptiveness of Nazi manipula–
tions ("based on a rather shrewd understanding of the Jewish [specula–
tive] intelligence" ). But probably more important than their taking
advantage of any specifically Jewish traits was the constant aura of
death the Nazis imposed by means of their pre-camp brutalizations. For
a central feature of anyone's encounter with death, most characteristically
during massive holocaust, is a cessation of feeling, a desensitization or
psychic numbing.
Hiroshima survivors, for instance, recall being fully aware, immedi–
ately after the bomb, of the grotesque scene of dead and dying around
them, but of very quickly findin:s themselves feeling no emotion whatso–
ever - experiencing what one called "a paralysis of the mind." Such
psychic numbing includes elements of denial
("If
I see nothing, then
death is not taking place"), and the severance of ordinary human
