WARTIME LIES by Louis Begley
Knopf; 198 pages; $19
Holocaust survivors talk of the shame of being alive. Relatives, playmates, teachers, strangers were shot where they lived or were shipped away and gassed, but they themselves somehow did not die. Why? By what justice?
Louis Begley, a Manhattan lawyer, was a young boy in eastern Poland when World War II broke out. In a remarkable, elegiac novel that surely is mostly memoir, he walks the poisoned ground. His narrator, Maciek, is the son of a prosperous Jewish doctor. Maciek's mother died in childbirth, but a large, protective family surrounds him: grandparents,...
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