Comprehending the Incomprehensible

...The effect is to emphasize the intensity of the nightmare by describing the inconsequential elements that contributed to it...

...The writing is appropriately terse and severe, and the sense of semihysteria which pervades the camp is fully realized...

...Regardless of whether the description is sociological and philosophical, as in Miss Arendt's case, or a fusion of fact and fantasy in a climate of other-worldliness, as in Blood from the Sky, the event itself is still touched with so much horror, despair, and guilt that any treatment seems ultimately inadequate...

...Conceivably, the uniqueness of the period resists description in any existing vocabulary...

...Succeeding generations of writers may be able to deal with the phenomenon more adequately, assuming that it is ever possible to comprehend the incomprehensible...

...Charles Scribner's Sons...

...There is a tremor of apprehension which shakes every layer of bureaucracy as this episode, which may or may not have been innocent, is weighed for malign implications and its possible threat to the hierarchy of the establishment, woebegone as it is...

...The furor aroused by the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem may be evidence that the slaughter of the Jews during the course of Hitler's Final Solution cannot be justly treated by the present generation of writers...

...However, the characters tend to become interchangeable, and there is a flattening of impact which detracts from the attempt to picture the abstract facade of a totalitarian community that is, at bottom, based on fear and insecurity...

...A somewhat cooler effort to penetrate the totalitarian world is made in Pawel Mayewski's novel, which describes the death of a dog, and the repercussions this event evokes among the inmates of an isolated labor camp...

...Thus, the indifferent hero is saved for meaningless life by the circumstances which helped send thousands of his fellows to mindless death...

...Piotr Rawicz, a Ukrainian Jew who survived three years at Auschwitz and two other concentration camps, and who now lives in France, has written a novel which deals with the Nazidominated world as a surrealist hell...

...It may be that the totalitarian experience, introduced into a civilization whose moral pretensions seemed to assert that such a possibility was unthinkable, has created a disjunction of values which renders contemporary analysis always short of final effectiveness...

...Into this catalog of terror, Rawicz introduces bits of poetry and segments of philosophical musings—the book is written in the form of a memoir left with an anonymous "I" who comments on its contents...

...The major section of the book describes a few months in a small Russian (or Polish) town during which a Nazi garrison rounded up Jews for shipment to the gas chambers on the basis of contradictory orders carried out with random cruelty...

...BLOOD FROM THE SKY, by Piotr Rawicz, translated by Peter Hays...

...A gifted writer who has been a student of philosophy and religion, Rawicz tries to lend cosmic significance to the holocaust, but in the end the most powerful sections are those which add still another glimpse into the pit of Nazism...

...178 pp., $1.65 (paper...

...The whimsical decisions, the frenzy of the victims seeking to avoid deportation, the madness of the leading Jew selected to make the original choices of those marked for death—these vignettes sum up a period of unprecedented horror...