Books: Terrible Test

THE SEVENTH CROSS—Anna Seghers—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Author Seghers' book is a new kind of novel about the Gestapo and its victims. Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male and Ethel Vance's Escape were dramatic stories of flight from the Gestapo. As a story, The Seventh Cross is just as good—and a lot more. The desperate lunges of its hunted fugitive hero against the constricting circle of Nazi pursuit generate the same kind of breathless fascination with which people watch a rabbit trying to escape the coils of a snake.

But Author Seghers does not set out simply to...