Pref Simone De Beauvoir (2 results)

Paperback. Condition: Good. First ed. thus--"First printing, May, 1968"; 301 p., clean and unmarked anywhere; binding tight; clean pictorial wrapper has some rubbing along lower edge of front panel.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 415 p. 22 cm. ; LCCN: 67-14236 ; OCLC: 394953 ; LC: D804.G4; Dewey: 940.547/2/43 ; black cloth ; "Nearly a million Jews were consumed by the ovens of Treblinka before August 2, 1943. On that day 600 prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacked the Nazi guards, burned the camp, and fled into the nearby Polish forests. Of these, forty survived to bear witness to man's courage in the face of the greatest evil human history has produced." ; "Jean-François Steiner's 1966 book Treblinka purports to be a factual account of what happened at the German concentration camp during the Second World War. It was, he says, based on the eyewitness testimony of 40 of the 600 inmates who escaped during the August 2, 1943 prisoner uprising. In the Afterword, Steiner explains that in order 'To reconstruct the history of Treblinka we have relied almost solely upon the testimony of the survivors.' In the Preface, no less an authority than feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir vouches for the veracity of the content: "Each detail is substantiated by the written and oral testimony he has collected and compared. In the Introduction, Terrence Des Pres states that 'Treblinka is as close to the facts as we are likely to come.' Limited concessions Steiner owes to having made to fictional reconstructions include the dialogue between the prisoners; done, he said, to give a storyline momentum and sense of immediacy to the action; pseudonyms for the actual names of Treblinka survivors; and reconstruction of several scenes -- but always, to be sure, as was noted above, based on eyewitness testimony he gathered from Treblinka survivors. Verbs like 'relied.upon' and 'substantiated,' and phrases such as 'close to the facts' and 'reconstruct the history,' all project an honest effort to reach for factual truth. But as Steiner informed OSI attorney, Betty Shave, the most important part of his book actually consisted of make-believe fantasies."--Orest Slepokura ; bookplate on front endpaper ; no dustjacket ; back hinge shaken, else VG. Book.…