The Final Station: Umschlagplatz

In a moving if sometimes awkward blend of fiction, history, meditation and autobiography, a Polish Christian, poet, essayist and playwright ponders a central question: How did the collapse of moral responsibility permit so many gentile Poles to denounce, betray and murder Polish Jews? As a crucial corollary theme, he considers the issue of why God allowed the Holocaust to occur. Umschlagplatz, the square in the Warsaw ghetto that served as the debarkation point for Jews packed into trains destined for the Nazi death camps, haunts Rymkiewicz's searching, expertly translated narrative. He painstakingly reconstructs the square's topography, mining histories, diaries and survivors' accounts. The book's chief fictive element involves a group of Jewish and Christian friends who meet at the dilapidated summer resort of Otwock in 1937 to romance and to discuss the looming, though not fully recognized menace of Hitler. The author's account of the Germans' 1942 extermination of the Otwock Jewish community (in conjunction with their annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto) makes this a valuable addition to Holocaust literature. (Mar.)