THE HOLOCAUST KINGDOM is the personal story of a Jewish couple who miraculously survived the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and of nine of Hitler's death camps (Seeker & Warburg, 30s.). Just before the uprising, they managed to smuggle their little son out to Christian friends.
Alexander Donat writes with great fairness and lack of hatred. One can only marvel at his charity. for the cruelties committed by the Germans are quite unparalleled in the history of the human race.
He is convinced that they feel no remorse for their crimes. Most Continentals — both Christian and Jcw — who lived under the German occupation, would agree with him.
In writing of his own people, Mr. Donat does not spare those who collaborated with the Germans, who made money at the expense of their fellow Jews, and he is bitter at the cowardice and brutality of the Jewish police of the Ghetto. He also poses the question: Why were the Jews so pacifist?
"How could young healthy parents hand over their children without bashing in the skulls of guards and executioners alike?" he asks. Had the Jews fought back earlier, "perhaps 20,000 even 50,000 of us would have been slain, but not 300,000."
In the end they did fight back, and one is pained to learn that the Poles, who had themselves suffered so much and fought so gallantly, did nothing to help them. Apparently, the Polish Underground refused arms to the Jews, and had the latter taken to the woods they would have risked being shot by the Poles.
It is also quite horrifying to read that in a Catholic orphanage children were told that Jews "drank the blood of Catholics on their holidays."
As a result of all that the author's wife saw in Auschwitz, she finds it impossible to believe that "man was created in the image of God."
Belief in the devil is unfashionable nowadays. but the horrors recounted in this deeply moving book are impossible to explain unless one accepts that, under the Nazi regime, the German nation was in the grip of some infernal power.
Certainly no one who reads this book will forget it easily.
Joan Young