Treblinka

New York: The New American Library [A Mentor Book], 1979. Eighth Printing [Stated]. Mass market paperback. Very good. xxiim 15-304, [4] pages. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Introduction by Terrence Des Pres. Preface by Simone de Beauvoir. Jean-François Steiner is a French-Jewish writer born on 17 February 1938 in Paris. He is best known for his non-fiction novel Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp first published in 1966 as Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination; translated a year later by Helen Weaver for Simon & Schuster. Written in the first person, the book blames members of the Jewish Sonderkommando for assisting the German SS in perpetrating a genocide. Following outrage among French, Jewish and foreign academics, Steiner agreed to republish his book (which was a bestseller), by presenting it as a fictional account of the Treblinka extermination camp operation. The book remains very popular in France. When asked upon the publication of his book why death camps such as Treblinka had been 'avoided' by his own French contemporaries, Steiner replied: "In Treblinka, as in all the other extermination camps, the Germans had designed 'the machine' (as they referred to the methods of extermination) in such a way that it would almost run itself. It is the Jews who did everything." Treblinka was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located north-east of Warsaw, 2.5 mi south of the Treblinka train station. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. The camp consisted of two separate units. Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp, whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease and mistreatment. The second camp, Treblinka II, was an extermination camp, referred to euphemistically as the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka by the Nazis. A small number of Jewish men who were not killed immediately upon arrival became its Jewish slave-labor units called Sonderkommandos, forced to bury the victims' bodies in mass graves.