Books: Graveyard Epic

NOTES FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO: THE JOURNAL OF EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM (369 pp.)—Edited and Translated by Jacob Sloan—McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

This book aspires to "an epic calm . . . the calm of the graveyard." The graveyard is the Warsaw ghetto. The epic is the story of the last hopeless resistance of 500,000 Jews to their Nazi exterminators. Nearly two decades after the event, the reader feels not only horror but a sense of wonder at having lived through a time that gave birth to such crimes.

This book was literally dug up. It is a translation...