Purely Commentary Treblinka: An Author and His Self-Hatred So much is being written about "Treblinka" by Jean-Francois Steiner, which Simon and Schuster has issued in a translation from the French by Helen Weaver, that it becomes necessary to view the volume as critically as possible in the interest of truth. The author's research is being challenged, his approach is questioned, he is being accused of self-hatred. Ile is only partly Jewish, his attitude is under scrutiny and if reality and actuality are to be confirmed it becomes necessary to present the views of critics in order that no one should be misled by what Steiner 'offers as facts. A review of his "Treblinka" that must be considered as most vital in the discussion is the one that was written for Saturday Review by Alexander Donat, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who is now an eminent American scientist. Dr. Donat is highly qualified to judge Steiner's book. Let us quote some of his comments: There is an old Yiddish joke that goes: "Have you heard that Ilabinovich made 100,000 rubles in furs?" "Yes, I have, but the story has a few minor inaccuracies: first of all, it was not Rabinovich at all but Levin; second, it was not 100,000 rubles but only 20,000; third, the transaction was in timber, not in furs; and lastly, the money was not made but lost." This perhaps typical unfunny joke is all too applicable to Jean-Francois Steiner's "Treblinka," both in its factual accuracy and in its interpretive bias. Jean-Francois Steiner, born near Paris in 1938, is the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His father, Kadmi Cohen, was deported during the war and died in a concentration camp. After the war Jean-Francois's mother married a Jewish physician, Ozias Steiner, who adopted the boy and raised him as a Jew. Like many other youngsters who knew little of the true history of the Holocaust, the boy was haunted into manhood by the question "Why did Jews let themselves be killed without resistance? Why did they go like sheep to slaughter?" Steiner turned to the literature of the Holocaust, interviewed survivors in France and in Israel (where he spent some time on a kibutz), and in the process "discovered" Treblinka. There, 75 miles northeast of Warsaw, 700,000—perhaps 800,000—Jews were gassed and cremated. Treblinka was also the scene of one of the most heroic acts of resistance against the Nazis. On August 2, 1943, the terrorized inmates rose in an armed revolt, set the death camp aflame, and escaped to the nearby forests. Of the thousand participating prisoners, only 600 managed to escape; a mere forty of those survived the war. One was Yankel Wiernik, a carpenter by trade, whose eyewitness testimony was printed by the under- ground during the war under the title "A Year in Treblinka." It is a classic account of Jewish martyrdom and heroism. Steiner chose Treblinka as a symbol, and his book is intended as "reportage," a biographical romance of a revolt in a death camp. Ile pieced together the scanty documentation, interviewed some of the few survivors, and wrote his account, For this, and in deserving if belated recognition of the heroes of the Jewish resistance, "Treblinka" was awarded the French literary Prix de la Resistance. But Steiner was trapped in the concentration camp of his own traumatic obsession: In bondage to his self-hatred and feeling of inferiority, he turned his book into a caricature of the reality that was Treblinka. In trying to prove a thesis he was entirely unprepared to cope with, and to explain the events at Treblinka in terms of a mystical interpretation of the Jewish personality and its historical context as if they were separate from general human traits or history at large, Steiner went far out of his depth. Alien to the world of the East European Jew, only superficially informed of the facts of Jewish life, Steiner reshaped events and personages to fit his thesis and his obsession. As one French-Jewish professor wrote: "The book no longer describes historical persons. It becomes a sort of theater of shadows where we see the reflection in the mind of a young Jew of 1966 of events which took place more than twenty years before, events he did not witness and which he interprets in terms of his own individual problems. This is less a document about concentration camps than a documentation of its author's psychology." (Many misrepresentations are exposed at this point and Dr. Donat then continues with his descreditation:) On page 373 Steiner makes one of the prisoners declare: "Some complain a little, but they are forgetting that every people must think first of itself. What Germans are doing is in the interest of Germany. Who can say that another people, our own even, placed in similar circumstances, would not have done the same?" Steiner is a classic example of double-think and double- standard mentality. He is not ashamed of the murderers who slaughtered six million Jews and six million non-Jews in extermi- nation camps that are the visible proof of the ultimate bank- ruptcy of our Western ethical values—the very bottom of human- ity's fall. But he is ashamed of the victims. Their helplessness he calls passivity; their succumbing to Nazi terror under unbeliev- able duress is "collaboration in self-destruction." Yet Steiner should know that such responses are neither specifically Jewish nor confined to Jews. Soviet prisoners-of-war, militant card- carrying Communists, the victims of Lidice, Oradour, or Malmedy, all went to their deaths "like sheep to the slaughter." And perhaps this is only homo sapiens's natural way of meeting death by terror and extermination. Resistance was not the rule in the Nazi reality for either Jew or Gentile; it was the rare exception, and the Jewish share in that exception was more than adequate. Steiner need not have been ashamed. As a Frenchman, was he ashamed to be part of a nation that after the liberation killed more than 100,000 Nazi collaborators? Is he ashamed of the 800 martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glan, burned alive in a church like "sheep?" And was he ashamed when the perpetrators of that crime got away with murder because so many of them turned out to be Alsatians (i.e., Frenchmen) mobilized into the Wehrmacht and shooting and burning their fellow Frenchmen "under duress"? The American edition of "Treblinka" underwent a thorough face-lifting operation. Full pages of drastic and irresponsible com- ment were deleted and many factual errors corrected; but numerous errors remain. To mention only a few: in the original "a convoy arrived from Mezritch near Smolensk." This was corrected in the American edition to "Mezritch near Bialystok." 2—Friday, iv.' 2, 1967 Author of 'Treblinka' Exposed as Self-Hating By Philip Slomovitz Shalom Sailing to Israel Canceled; Liner Headed to Canada's Exp7o Instead Mezritch was a town, famous for its Jewish bristle workers and brushmakers, in the Lublin district. Such a correction amounts to changing "Yonkers near Chicago" to "Yonkers near Washington, D.C." Steiner writes: "At the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto . . . Meir had seen Ukrainian soldiers . . ." There were no Ukrainian soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto until the big resettle- ment in July 1942. The author states that "eighty thousand Jews were left in the Warsaw ghetto" after the resettlement; but every student of the Holocaust knows the number to have been NEW YORK — The Zim Lines announced the cancellation of the SS Shalom's May 31 sailing from New York to Haifa, an_d stated that the vessel will make two addition- the words attributed to Christ on the cross. Part of the surgery performed on the American version has changed the names of all living survivors. Thus, Dr. Marc Dvorjetsky, author of the well-known Vilna volume "Jerusalem of Lithuania," has been renamed Dr. David Ginsberg; the Vilna resistance leader, Abba Kovner, has become Dan Azriel; Abraham Lindwasser is now Sholek Blumenthal. Ruszcka Korzack, a noted resistance member and author of "Flames in Ash," lost both name and sex, and turned into David Rosen. This panicky mass- baptism has simple and pedestrian causes: the survivors Steiner interviewed were so outraged by his use of their stories for a work which so falsified the meaning of their experiences that they started a lawsuit against him. "Treblinka" has stirred a lively controversy in France. The book's critics are led by David Rausset, himself an old concentra- tion-camp inmate, whose "Les Tours de notre mort" and - "l'Univers concentrationnaire" are landmarks of the literature. Of Steiner, Rousset wrote briefly and devastatingly in "Candide": "He un- derstood nothing of what the concentration-camp society was really like. He doesn't know the depth of the camps, And of the horror he knows only the theatrical side." The Gentile Rousset further accuses Steiner of being "either an anti-Semite or a Jewish racist." And there is ample evidence in the book for Rousset's contentions, There is no room in Steiner's imaginary world for decent, brave Jews. If one of them does impress him, as the character called Djielo does, Steiner denies his Jewishness: "He (Djielo) was only waiting for the death of the last anti-Semite to stop being a Jew?' Even those Jews who did revolt at Treblinka are neither forgiven nor rehabilitated by Steiner. "They are heroes beyond compare whom circumstances snatched from anony- mity, but there is no essential difference between them and the mass of prisoners. Like the rest they allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter, like the rest they became accomplices of extermination." Steiner describes the feelings of Adolf, a member of the resistance, on the eve of the revolt: "He, the little despicable Jew, the little ghetto Jew, the vermin, the subhuman was on his way to undermine the beautiful edifice of the tall officer, blond and handsome and black who considered himself God." (page 283 of the French original, also deleted from the American edition.) This, then, is "Treblinka," by Jean-Francois Steiner—but this is not the way Treblinka was. For at heart of the book is the canker of Steiner's self-hatred and inexperience, turning his literary looking glass into a distorting mirror. There must be no distortions of history, especially when one attempts to interpret a tragedy as farce and to misinterpret ideas and ideals. Jews have suffered enough from it without being subjected to the popularized ideas of a self-hating man. That is why Dr. Donat's views are so important, that is why we must share them with our readers so that facts should not be turned into fiction and a tragedy contorted into a game for selfish purposes. days' duration and will begin in New York June 8 and June 19. They will include three-day stop- overs at Montreal where the Shalom will serve as hotel for her passengers. Completely sold out or almost sold out are the liner's July 28, Aug. 8 and Aug. 18 cruises to Expo. Some space remains on the Expo cruises scheduled to sail from New al cruises to Montreal and Expo '67 instead. In a statement issued in Haifa, the Zim Lines' management de- clared that the decision to cancel the May 31 sailing was made in closer to fifty thousand. view of many cancellations of which shows not only Steiner's curiously Another item, sympathetic attitude toward the Germans but also his profound bookings by U. S. citizens following ignorance of Jewish life and tradition, is most revealing. In the U. S. State Department's advice the French version he writes: "There was another folk song, to Americans not to visit Middle which they liked very much, It was a long complaint to the Eastern countries, including Israel, prophet Elie who forsook his people. The song asked: 'Elie, Elie, during the present crisis. The scheduling of two additional why hast thou forsaken us?' The nostalgic SS officers listened with emotion . . long into the night . . moved almost to cruises to Canada's World's Fair was in response to heavy public de- compassion...." How ill-informed an author and how inauthentic a Jew must a man be who doesn't even know the Eli, Eli, mand for space on the Shalom's who doesn't even know that it means "My God! My God! Why six cruises to Expo that were an- hast Thou forsaken us?" and who also, and equally grievous and nounced earlier this year. The two perhaps additionally revealing, does not know that those are additional cruises will be of 11 York Aug. 28 and Sept. 8. CORE Called Biased in Teacher Dispute NEW YORK (JTA)—A New York lodge of Bnai Brith accused a Negro civil rights organizations of "anti- Semitic prejudice" in their denun- ciations of Jewish teachers and supervisors in Brooklyn and Queens elementary and junior high schools. A CORE spokesman denied the charge. The Schoolmen's Lodge declared, in a letter to Board of Education President Giardano and Superin- tendent of Schools Bernard Dono- van, that they should act to "halt the growing instance of attacks against Jewish teachers and super- visors." CORE and other organizations are trying to have principals and teachers in four schools in the two boroughs transferred. Louis Samet, lodge president, said in the letter: "We have docu- mented evidence which indicates that the charges made against the teachers and supervisors of those schools are without foundation and are based on anti-white and anti- Semitic prejudice." The letter said that the civil rights groups were making "un- founded charges of incompetence, followed by picketing, boycotts, anti-Semitic statements and threats of violence against teachers, prin- cipals and district superintend- ents." Anti-Defamation League Study Reveals Negroes Prefer Jews Over Non-Jewish Whites, Including Landlords NEW YORK (JTA) — A study sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith has found that to the degree that American Negroes distinguish between Jew- ish and non-Jewish whites, they prefer Jews and are less anti- Semitic than whites. The study was part of a five-year research project on prejudice con- ducted by the University of Cali- fornia Survey Research Center with an ADL grant. Interviews for the study were made in 1964 with 1,119 Negro adults in four major urban cen- ters—Chicago, New York, Atlanta and Birmingham—as well as in other metropolitan areas outside the south and from a representa- tive cross section of the adult na- tional population. Interviewing and sampling were done by the Na- tional Opinion Research Center at the University of -Chicago. The study found that nationally, 24 per cent of Negroes queried said Jewish landlords were better than other white landlords and 7 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS per cent said they were worse. In New York City, 17 per cent thought Jewish landlords were better and 9 per cent worse. In Chicago the percentages were 20 and 6; in Atlanta, 31 and 4; and in Birm- ingham, 19 and 4. Nationally, 29 per cent said Jewish store owners were better than other white store owners and 7 per cent said worse. In Atlanta the percentages were 32 and 4 and in Birmingham, 28 and 5. The study found that 34 per cent of the total sample said Jews were better to work for and 19 per cent said Jews were worse than other whites; 70 per cent said Jews were better than other whites on hiring Negroes and 45 per cent believed that Jews were more in favor of civil rights than other whites, while 3 per cent felt that Jews were less in favor. More than 80 per cent of the total sample said they had never been treated unfairly by Jewish mer- chants, 62 per cent said it was easier to get credit in a Jewish- owned store and 9 per cent said it was not easier. Forty-nine per cent said Jews were easier on Negroes who fell behind in payments and 16 per cent said Jews were harder. The remaining respondents saw no dif- ference or said they did not know which was better. The study found that where Jews do not predominate in the Negro ghettoes, "the particular ethnic group that does is likely to be the recipient of economically-inspired hostility," specifically the Chinese in some west coast communities and Italians in New Orleans. Israeli Expo '67 Pavilion Reopens After Threats MONTREAL (JTA) — The Is- raeli pavilion reopened after being closed last week because of "threats" believed to have come from Arabs or others be- cause of the crisis in the Near East. It was not clear whether the threats involved a possible danger of bombing, burning, sr otherwise attacking the pavilion.