TREBLINKA

Memoir by Jean-François Steiner, 1966

Jean-François Steiner's expressed intention in his book Treblinka , published in French in 1966 and in English in 1967, was "to reconstruct the history of Treblinka,"changing only the names of those survivors who requested it. After introductory chapters describing the events leading up to the destruction of the Vilna ghetto, Treblinka tells the story of the death camp from the perspective of its slave prisoners, with a strong emphasis on the planning and execution of the uprising of 2 August 1943. Steiner used both written testimonies and personal interviews with a number of survivors. As Terrence Des Pres has said, "Telling the story from the inside requires novelistic techniques." These include imaginary dialogue, character sketches, and the dramatized montage of fiction. Steiner, however, does not acknowledge this, and the book is presented as a literal representation of real events and is therefore vulnerable to the criticism that it misrepresents the "facts."

James E. Young has used Treblinka as an example of what he categorizes as "documentary fiction," which, he argues, creates "the illusion of documentary authority generated by authentic eyewitnesses [which] sustains [its] putative factuality … and, by extension [its] power." But Steiner's authority, such as it is, derives not so much from the single instance in the book of direct quotation from the testimony of a survivor, Yankel Wiernik, but from the author's interviews with survivors and his study of witness testimonies combined with his claim about reconstructing the camp's history. Young's analysis of documentary fiction depends on the assumption that the reader of such works is naive: "By allowing himself to be moved to the willing suspension of disbelief by the documentary novel's contrived historical authority, the reader risks becoming ensnared in the encompassing fiction of the discourse itself, mistaking the historical force of this discourse for the historical facts it purports to document."

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has described the controversy the book generated as arising from its "being read as [a] historical document" by readers who overlooked works like Wiernik's testimony. Neal Ascherson, too, has worried that "Jean-François Steiner's documentary novel will from now on become the general reference for 'the camps."' Young, Ezrahi, and Ascherson make the unwarranted assumption that the reader is unable to distinguish between the facts of Treblinka and the, necessarily, fictional elements in the narrative. The presence of dialogue is a clear sign to the reader of reconstruction. Moreover, the English translation includes Des Pres's introduction, which alerts the reader to Steiner's use of novelistic techniques.

Ezrahi believes that Steiner's "failure lies in his imposition of aesthetic forms on historical events rather than transforming those events through the imagination." But Steiner did transform the events using his imagination. What are the reconstructed conversations and events in the book if they are not the product of Steiner's imagination? It is possible that Steiner failed to take the risk of acknowledging the important role played by his imagination. He may have done so because, if he had admitted his function as a creative writer, rather than encouraging the illusion that he was simply a passive conduit of historical truth, this might have led his readers to suspect that whenever actuality impeded aesthetic effect he had succumbed to the temptation to discard the truth, preferring the symmetries of art to the ambiguities of the mundane. Steiner is not alone in this. Many professional historians are similarly disinclined to be open about the way their construction of historical narratives resembles the methods of creative writers.

Steiner interpreted what occurred at Treblinka in terms of a redemptive process. He describes the decision to plan the uprising as "the recovery of [the prisoners'] humanity": "Just when their abdication was total, when all values had ceased to exist, when their humanity had almost left them, the Jews, rousing themselves at the bottom of the abyss, began a slow ascent which death alone would stop." The author does not seriously consider the possibility that for many of the prisoners, rather than being the culmination of a redemptive process, the uprising was simply a desperate act by men with nothing to lose. All hope of surviving the war as a prisoner at Treblinka had, by August 1943, disappeared because new transports had ceased, the cremation of the corpses was almost complete, the Wehrmacht was in retreat on the Eastern Front, and the prisoners were certain that no Jewish witnesses would be allowed to survive the closure of the camp.

Treblinka remains valuable because, as George Steiner has said, "it represents the effort … to enter hell by act of imaginative talent," with all the risks this entails.

—Alan Polak