From The Depths Of Our Century

...It is a book that should be read by all who are troubled by man's capacity for inhumanity...

...The SS man told him: "Go hang yourself...

...To be sure, life in the ghetto became progressively harder, but, as Donat puts it, the Jews had fallen "victim to our faith in mankind, our belief that hu manity had set limits to the degrada tion and persecution of one's fellow man...

...Resistance to the Nazis therefore seemed a futile gesture...

...The Jew thereupon "took off his belt and obediently hanged himself...

...There were, of course, other reasons for the failure of the Jews to resist before April, 1943, such as the early disappearance of many of the ablest and most militant leaders, the mis government of the Judenrat, the lack of a military tradition, the difficulty in obtaining arms, the hopelessness of a military conflict against the armed might of the Nazis...

...The second point—not unrelated to the first—that emerges from Mr...

...As the following incident suggests, perhaps equally important was that in the atmosphere of bestiality many men lost all sense of proportion, all sense of reality as they had normally conceived it: One day a Jewish concentration camp inmate lost his shoes in the mud and asked his SS superior what to do...

...He discusses the organization of the ghetto, the ruses that were necessary for survival, the deportations to the gas chambers and the uprising in April, 1943, which ended in the destruction of the ghetto...

...The Donats' own will to survive is striking testimony to the strength of this faith...

...He relates many incidents of brutality by Jewish officials against fellow Jews in the camps, of Jewish policemen rounding up friends and close relatives for the gas chambers in order to fulfill their quotas, of fathers stealing their sick sons' food, of Jewish officials meekly and obediently carrying out Nazi orders...

...It is unlikely that fanatics of this kind would have been deterred from their destructive course had the Jews shown signs of resistance a year or two before the Warsaw ghetto uprising...

...Precisely because it is for the most part a highly personal memoir, the book makes an impact that no scholarly study could match...

...The over-all impact is shattering...

...There are infelicities in Donat's book, most notably in the next to last chapter in which his son's experiences are related, but these are minor...

...This psychic transformation of the inmates, often involving the adoption of the attitudes of their persecutors, was in some ways the most tragic and gruesome consequence of the Nazi terror...

...ment...

...Turning only occasionally to history or polemics, Mr...

...The very few who did resist were shot...

...Miraculously, they survived the uprising, though for the next two years they were separated, each forced to live—if the word may be used in this context—in a series of concentration camps...

...This mentality underlay the be havior of the Jewish leadership at the very beginning of the Resettlement [transport to the gas chambers], when the overwhelming majority voted against armed resistance...

...Apart from reminding us once again of the ghastliness of the Nazi terror, Donat's memoir is important because it contains valuable material concerning three aspects of the situation that have often been forgotten in recent controversies...

...For men are much more capable of responding to the agonies of individuals than to those of the multitude, which in their very enormity seem beyond comprehension...

...No matter how familiar one might be with the horrors of Nazism, this straightforward account of the sufferings of one family is bound to arouse a variety of emotional reactions: outrage, pity, disgust, bewilder...

...As long as the ghetto existed—and the Nazis made every effort to give the impression that it would continue in definitely,—there was hope that a sub stantial remnant would survive the war...

...The first is that the Nazi persecution of Warsaw Jewry was a gradual process, moving from severe, though "bearable," policies to the final program of liquidation...

...Donat's book will be able to put it down without having been deeply moved...

...Donat concentrates on relating his own experiences...

...Donat's memoir is the degree to which Nazi terror ultimately demoralized and dehumanized its victims...

...He describes his family's existence in the Warsaw ghetto, the frightful deprivations, the Nazi cruelties, the fears and the despair...

...The third general impression derived from the book, like the first two, is not new but often overlooked: the utter fanaticism with which the Nazis pursued their aim of liquidating the Jews...

...Although it is clear that he rejects Hannah Arendt's thesis about the meaning and significance of Jewish "collaboration" with the Nazis, he makes no attempt to deny that many Jews did indeed do the bidding of their persecutors...

...When the ghetto was first established no Jew, nor anyone else, imagined that the fate of his community would be total annihilation...

...Shortly before, the Donats had managed to smuggle their five-year-old son out of the ghetto and had billeted him with a gentile family...

...But the single most important fact seems to have been an inability to believe that the Nazis had really decided on the ultimate crime...

...General Stroop's artillery, used so devastatingly against the ghetto in April, 1943, could easily have been turned against it two years earlier...

...Even towards the end of the war, when any rational person must have realized that all was lost, the Nazis still were concerned to eliminate as many Jews as possible, and took every precaution to move Jews out of areas about to be occupied by Allied troops even though the German Army desperately needed all means of transportation...

...It would be a mistake, how ever, to assume that this sort of behavior was simply a consequence of a desperate desire to remain alive, though undoubtedly this was a crucial factor...