Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience [Paperback]

First of all ignore the Nazis marketing; the stark red, black and white cover with the obligatory swastika and the obligatory gothic font; also ignore the obligatory Elie Wiesel imprimatur on the back cover. They tell you nothing of what is inside.

Ms. Sereny is primarily an interviewer; in her book "Into That Darkness" she produces a biography of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of the Triblinka extermination Camp in central Poland in 1943. For most of us he and his deathcamp rank at the bottom if not define human atrocity. Ms. Sereny talks to Stangl not a journalist or reporter but as a therapist, and for Stangl this is both the first time and the last time "I never talked to anyone like this"; he dies hours afterwards.

Her picture of Stangl is of a man struggling with his own past behavior, so conflicted in his inability to reconcile his personal concessions; he has developed into two men. One in continuous battle with the other, irreconcilable in their differences, both authors of the same criminal acts from inside one mind. We see both Herr Stangls parse, compartmentalize, excuse, avoid, dodge, stonewall and counter-accuse in a twisted effort to find a logic that will allow them to inhabit that one mind.

Just that Stangl is twisted in conflict at all means that there was in him a spark of recognition of both good and evil as separate things. Moral and immoral, criminal and civil, humane and inhumane; that spark of conscience still glows enough to allow a dim and tardy discrimination. That faint light surrounded by all that darkness is what tears him into two personalities; its the only way he can reconcile the behavior of both; its the only thing that keeps him from becoming an animal. Ms. Sereny finds that animal and turns its slowly in that dim light and destroys both the Stangls.

A third of this book hangs the heavy cloak of complicity squarely on the shoulders of the Vatican. She is not too kind to Simon Wiesenthal either.

Put this book up on your shelf next to Arendt.

Sereny's is no mere biography of Stangl; instead, his life becomes the point of departure for a complex look at Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans (and Austrians, like Stangl), the workings of Treblinka, the escape and pursuit of Stangl after the war's end, and the Catholic Church's complicity in aiding Nazi war criminals. On this last subject, readers will especially appreciate Sereny's thoughtful and scholarly approach, as well as her persuasive conclusions regarding Pope Pius XII's curiously ambivalent behavior at the peak of the death camps' operations. Compare Sereny's analysis with the recent Vatican apology (of sorts), and judge for yourself which is the more credible account.

Throughout the book, Sereny manages to keep the focus on individuals and still retain the vast scope necessary to treat the Holocaust as a historical event. Stangl himself is presented as an ordinary man who made his Faustian pact and tried, like so many former prisoners of the camps, to move on and repress his feelings without processing them. His interviews with Sereny were ultimately as cathartic as they were therapeutic, and he died soon after their last meeting.

The impression we are left with at the end of "Into That Darkness" is one of tragedy as well as horror, for unlike a Goebbels or a Himmler or an Eichmann, Stangl could have been one of us. Sereny makes no apologies for Stangl; quite the contrary. But that's what makes this particular truth so hard to face.