VENGEANCE IS MINE

This 1943 novella by the Austrian Jewish writer Torberg—published before the horrors of the Nazi death camps were widely known—describes a brutal showdown between a Jewish prisoner and the German SS officer who calmly tells him he is about to die.

Available in English for the first time, the novella, set in late 1940, has two nameless narrators. The first waits on a New Jersey pier for a ship to appear, carrying friends from Europe. He encounters a gaunt, haunted-looking fellow and invites him to spend time together while they wait. At a nearby bar, the stranger becomes the book’s second narrator, relating his grueling experience in the Heidenburg camp, a fictional precursor to the factory-like extermination camps where millions of Jews would die. There, he was among 80 Jewish men separated from other prisoners and crammed into an undersized “Jew Barracks” as part of the snide and sadistic commandant Wagenseil’s plan to get them to kill themselves. When an aged professor complains of too little space for so many men, Wagenseil has him beaten and tortured until he commits suicide by swallowing poison kept in his pocket. Another victim is led to shoot himself with the gun Wagenseil left in his cell for that purpose. During a violent session with the commandant that leaves him delirious, the narrator grabs Wagenseil's dropped revolver and is gripped with indecision over what to do with it, frozen by a devout prisoner's declaration that vengeance belongs to the Lord and the Lord alone. That pained moment of moral reckoning haunts the man as he waits at the pier for any fellow former prisoners to arrive on a trans-Atlantic ship, hoping some escaped the Nazis, as he did. The shocking conclusion to his story turns the novella on its head, giving it the unsettling power of books four times its length. It’s also a book that can, and should, be read more than once for full emotional effect.

A spare, unshakable account of the Holocaust.