France: Treblinka Revisited

In Paris this week, survivors of Nazi death camps marched up the Champs-Elysées to mark the annual day of mourning for those who died in the more than 2,000 camps that were scattered throughout German-occupied Europe. This year the memory of the dead was clouded by a controversy that, nearly a quarter of a century later, still raises deep and bitter passions. More than half of the 12 million who died in concentration camps were Jews—and both the fact and manner of their deaths have since haunted their fellow Jews around the world. In a new book, Treblinka, a French Jew named Jean-François Steiner, 28, has raised a storm in France by suggesting that many of them died because they were too cowardly to fight back.

Steiner, whose father died in a concentration camp, is a journalist who worked on Jean-Paul Sartre's Temps Modernes and the pro-Gaullist weekly Nouveau Candide before beginning his book. Treblinka takes its title from the death camp 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, where some 700,000 Jews were gassed, shot, hanged or beaten to death. Steiner interviewed 15 of the 40 survivors of Treblinka now living in Israel, used fictional techniques to reconstruct the life and sudden death of the in- mates. The book's high point is the revolt, on Aug. 2, 1943, of the Jewish Sonderkommando, the laborers detailed to wrench gold teeth from corpses and bury the dead. With smuggled arms, the Jews killed 20 of their captors. Some 300 prisoners escaped from the camp, but all but 40 of them were eventually hunted down and executed.

Speculative Intelligence.Steiner's thesis, presented in language that Existentialist Author Simone de Beauvoir calls in her introduction "neither pathetic nor indignant but with a calculated coolness," is that there should have been a lot more revolts like that. "Certainly," Steiner writes, "there was a share of cowardice in the attitude of the Jewish masses who preferred to endure the vilest humiliation than to revolt." He seems to believe that something in the Jewish character produced the victims' resignation to their fate, says that "death does not have for the Jew the definitive character that it has in general for other men." Part of the Jewish inaction, he suggests, was due to "a speculative intelligence, which sometimes loses contact with reality. Jewish intelligence attaches almost more importance to the manner of posing a problem and of resolving it than to the solution itself."

The 396-page book contains enough such opinions to raise plenty of hackles, but Steiner went even further in public statements. "I felt ashamed," he told one interviewer, "to be the son of this people of 6,000,000 victims who permitted themselves to be pushed into gas chambers. In the camps the victims themselves, the Jews, made themselves the accomplices of their extermination."