Books: Variations on a Theme

TREBLINKA by Jean-François Steiner. 415 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

There is a horrifying sameness to books about Nazi concentration camps. To have read once about Auschwitz or Belsen or Dachau ought to be enough for anyone who does not want to hide from facts. Yet each successive volume uncovers new variations on the theme of human bestiality. This fictionalized account is unusual in that it begins with the agonized if rather naive question of why the Jewish victims of the Nazis did not try to fight against their doom. It ends up—almost, it sometimes seems, against the author's intent—as an account...

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