Surviving Treblinka

This memoir takes the reader inside infamous Treblinka, a camp in Poland where, between 1942 and 1943, approximately 900,000 Jews were incarcerated by the Nazis. One of the few survivors, Willenberg escaped and subsequently fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; he now lives in Israel. Describing grisly jobs (e.g., sorting and examining the clothing of the dead for secreted valuables) to which he was assigned in what was ostensibly a labor camp, Willenberg sketches maps and offers a detailed account of his life in the camp and his harrowing escape from it. This intensely personal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust indicts Poles and Ukrainians, among others, for complicity, as it praises the heroism of those who made possible the author's survival. Illustrations not seen by PW. (June)