Books: The Ashes of 0 Warsaw

THE WALL (632 pp.)—John Mersey—Knopf ($4).

The wall of John Hersey's title is the one built by the Germans around Warsaw's Jewish quarter during their wartime occupation; his story is the slow extermination of the people caught inside it; his theme the breaking down of the self-built wall of passive meekness which has so long enclosed European Jewry in the invisible prison of the ghetto mind.

Warsaw's Jews first thought that the Nazis' coming meant" no more than a switch of anti-Semitic rulers. The book describes their slow wakening to the realities of race...