STEINER, Jean-François

Nationality: French. Born: 1938.

Publication

Novel

Treblinka. 1966; translated as Treblinka, 1967.

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Critical Study:

"Jean-Francois Steiner's Treblinka: Reading Fiction and Fact" by David J. Bond, in Papers on Language and Literature, 26(3), Summer 1990, pp. 370-78.

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Jean-François Steiner was born in 1938 of a Jewish father who was killed at Treblinka and a Catholic mother. According to George Steiner , it was a trip to Israel and the malaise felt by younger Jews throughout the Adolf Eichmann trial about the passivity of Holocaust victims that prompted Jean-François Steiner to interview the handful of survivors of Treblinka and to write an account of the revolt in the extermination camp. His book Treblinka was first published in France in 1966, and Helen Weaver's English translation was published the following year.

Treblinka proved to be a controversial best-seller. Praised in a preface by Simone de Beauvoir as a vindication of Jewish courage, it was bitterly attacked by others, including David Rousset and Léon Poliakov, for its alleged inaccuracies, racism, and general thesis of Jewish passivity. Richard Glazar , a survivor of Treblinka, wrote an open letter to Steiner in which he expressed the "profound dismay felt by all the survivors at the politically or personally motivated misrepresentations of real events and real people, most of them now dead and unable to defend themselves." The survivors were particularly incensed by what was said to be Steiner's false claim that a kapo named Kurland personally administered fatal injections to those of the elderly and infirm who were incapable of walking to the gas chambers.

Neal Ascherson has criticized Steiner's view of the SS, referred to throughout Treblinka as "the Technicians." Ascherson has disputed the image of SS members as intellectual and coolheaded characters and has objected to what he describes as Steiner's "easy equation of their disgusting ingenuities with the 'de-humanizing efficiency' of modern factory practice." Terrence Des Pres, while acknowledging the technical expertise of the German higher officials who designed and ran the death camps but who were not directly involved in their day-to-day operations, believes that we now know there to have been a great deal of sloppiness, trial and error, and heavy drinking among the SS personnel, which suggests that they were not as fully in command as they were thought to be.

Ascherson has praised Steiner for his description of the state of mind of the Jews within the camp and for the way he traced their recovery from total enslavement toward the will to resist and save themselves. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, on the contrary, sees Steiner's depiction of the regeneration of the Jewish slave prisoners as an ideological bias that led him to distort the history of the camp: "In Treblinka , [Steiner] tailors the evidence of a revolt in a death camp to a rigid procrustean concept of Jewish history." Steiner's ideological commitment, she asserts, "directs the organization of his material; he attempts to trace a progressive emergence out of slavery to a point where the Jews are seen as masters of their own fate."

Steiner and his book continue to be controversial and are the target of a number of revisionist websites.

—Alan Polak

See the essay on Treblinka.