Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising

Rating:
Summary: Astounding
Review: Clearly, Stephen G. Esrati (review below) has an obsession with footnotes (a footnote fetish, if you will). Leave it to the "expertise" of a writer for stamp collectors to give such a ridiculously blind review of one of the most amazing books on the Holocaust ever written. Village of a Million Spirits is, quite simply, a mind-blowing account of the Treblinka revolt. Perhaps unlike Mr. Esrati, I have studied the Holocaust extensively, and I can confidently state that McMillan's book is based on ample research. VMS is a stirring, horrifying (yes, the Holocast was gruesome, Mr. Esrati - deal with it), and mesmirizing story. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Emphasis is on gruesome detail
Review: MacMillan's book is a novel. In the interview that follows his story he says
he has not talked to anyone who was at Treblinka and has never been there.
He has done it all through reading. But, unlike Paul Erdman's books about
Switzerland's role in the Holocaust, MacMillan provides no footnotes. The
book screams for a treatment like Erdman's.
For example: We all know about the shipment of people packed tightly
together in boxcars, but MacMillan also describes a luxury train from
Vienna, on which the passengers, described as rich Jews, drink champagne.
The reader cries out: "Where did MacMillan get this idea from? Were there
such luxury trains from Vienna in October 1942?" The reader is left
wondering, having to trust that MacMillan has written a historical novel
that deals honestly with history even if all the characters except Kurt
Franz are fictional.
I was unaware that a novelist could use footnotes until I read Erdman. I did
not use them in my two historical novels. I wish I had.
Although the book's subtitle refers to the Treblinka Uprising, the book is
neither about the uprising nor about what actually happened to the survivors who escaped. In point of fact, the book is a catalog of ugly scenes that could have been written by the Maquis de Sade. The horrors keep occurring and one is worse than the previous: rape, torture, murder. One particularly gruesome scene involves the cutting off of a Ukrainian guard's finger with a hedge clipper. You can actually feel the pain, hear the screams because MacMillan is a very good writer who can tell a story in a few words.
Overhanging the story is the inevitability of death. You die tomorrow if is
there is a mark on your face, so the Germans always hit the Jews in the
face. You are taken to the "Hospital," a place for murder. A Jew is killed
because Kurt Franz thinks the Jew has been cruel to his dog. The killing is
gruesome.
But running parallel to the story is the tale of Magda, a Polish girl who is
in labor, pregnant by the Ukrainian who suffers the finger amputation.
Frankly, I wanted to skip these pages. I did not care about the fact that
Magda's water had broken, that Magda was in pain. She was an interruption to the story of the uprising.
And then we get to the uprising itself. Magda's boyfriend has sold guns to
the Jews. (Oh, if we only could have had a footnote or two!) The uprising
takes place, but it is only a few pages in the body of the work. It tells us
little of what happened. It is the exact opposite of Richard Rashke's _Escape from Sobibor_ (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1982) which described the breakout in minute detail and made it convincing. MacMillan's escape falls flat.
One disconcerting thing about "Village of a Million Spirits" is that the
inmates of Treblinka are consistently referred to as "workers." They are
never called slaves; seldom called Jews (although we are always aware that they are Jews).
There is one brief scene in which Romani Gypsies come to Treblinka, but
their fate is left unclear.
But we get altogether too much of the fate of the "workers," whether they empty out boxcars, search clothing for valuables, carry bodies, extract gold teeth. We feel their hunger, their thirst, and their pain. MacMillan is a fine writer, but this is an abhorrent book.
We don't learn much about either the Germans (whom MacMillan consistently calls "officers" even if they are enlisted men) or the Ukrainians. Which brings up one particular Ukrainian, "Ivan Grozny" (Ivan the Terrible), the operator of the tank engine that feeds carbon monoxide into the gas chamber.
"Ivan Grozny" is famous.
Jean-Francois Steiner in "Treblinka" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967)
describes this monster and has him killed during the heroic uprising.
Macmillan refers a few times to an Ivan, but never tells much about him.
That's a pity in view of the large body of evidence about Ivan that surfaced during the trials of John Demjanjuk (which I reported for the Toronto "Globe and Mail"). Here is a book, written after the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Demjanjuk was not "Ivan Grozny" and it tells us nothing about "Ivan Grozny."
One thing that MacMillan makes absolutely clear is that the Germans and the Ukrainians stole all they could from the prisoners and from the Third Reich.
The staff and inmates of Treblinka look forward to each new trainload of
loot.
In the interview at the end of the book, MacMillan cites the response of
Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl to Gitta Sereny when she asked: "What did you think at the time was the reason for the extermination of the Jews?"
"They wanted their money," he replied.
As a professional writer for stamp collectors, I found MacMillan's depiction
of the seizure and handling of a valuable stamp collection (of U.S. stamps,
of all things) almost farcical.

Rating:
Summary: Full of horror, yet avoids exploitation or sentiment
Review: Many of the other reviewers have pointed out the strengths of this novel. Reading it--in one sitting--after the author's earlier 1981 collection Orbit of Darkness, I was impressed most with MacMillan's ability to shift into multiple characters and narrative shifts to circle around the year or so before the Treblinka revolt to keep my interest and avoid the neatly plotted historical novel. While his detachment may disappoint those looking for a conventional melodrama, he takes on the challenge of description of the body--and bodies--in an unsparingly clinical manner.

This fits the gaze required of the perpetrators and those who they forced to be its victims, for minutes before they were gassed, or for months before they perished as slave workers. By this clinical stance, MacMillan forces us to see the excavation of the bodies for burning as the Soviets threaten to near the camp as the Nazis slowly realize that they will lose the war. The scenes of childbirth, of beatings, of natural beauty somehow still lurking just outside the camp perimeter all join to put you in the place of those who died there, slowly or more rapidly.

MacMillan's greatest skill lies not in tying together the loose ends of his plot--people die and vanish without clear explanation, just as it must have been for those in Treblinka. The meticulous research evident here constructs a phenomenological, not a investigative, report of how the camp crushed its victims. You feel the gas chamber for yourself, you see the "hospital," you feel yourself losing touch with cold reality as the seasons change. This is not a book for light reading, but it will endure in the minds of those mature enough to accept its version of the extremes under which people will put other people. He avoids cliche, and one scene that I recognized as a holdover from his earlier Orbit story-series repeated a particularly apropos phrase or two, but since the scene of the new dentist's task is so vivid, I'll accept the repetition on artistic grounds. MacM does write painstakingly.

4 1/2 stars, for some loose narrative ends that could have either been excised or threaded more satisfactorily, but also the same amount of stars for the craft and morality at the heart of this moving and chilling novel about perverted reality.