A fictional account of Nazi depravity

By Jonathan Littell

Translated from the French

by Charlotte Mandell

HarperCollins. 984 pp. $29.99

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Bernhardt Blumenthal

'It's like stepping on a cockroach," we learn from an SS officer as he describes the liquidation of a Jew in the Sobibor concentration camp.

The Kindly Ones

, Jonathan Littell's fictional account of Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front in World War II, leads us through the lower depths of hell.

This tale of the dark night of the soul was written in French by Littell, an American Jew. Readers who undertake the prodigious task of reading his almost 1,000-page account of depravity and bestiality are well advised to heed Dante's admonition inscribed on the gates of hell: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Yet the vast panorama of human suffering exposed in this story, its epic sweep through Nazi wastelands of Eastern Europe, signals that with The Kindly Ones, Littell has made a major contribution to French literature in the 21st century.

Littell's narrator is Max Aue, an officer in the intelligence division of the SS, who asks the reader to accept his memories simply as a record of the time. Aue, who participates in the killing of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, partisans, and political deviants, offers no apology for his actions and expresses no remorse. Nor does he record any misgivings for his incestuous relationship with his twin sister or his sodomizing of boys. He's also a matricide, much like Aeschylus' Orestes, who also murdered his mother and escaped the Furies thanks to their metamorphosis into the Kindly Ones, who spared him. Aue, who is French-German bilingual, is able, in fact, to escape all responsibility for his actions after the war and slip into the identity of a French businessman.

This is not a book for the squeamish. There are endless nauseating descriptions of some of the most brutal crimes of the 20th century: an SS officer smashing the head of a Jew with a shovel as he lies before a cadre of other officers, who raucously applaud the spatter of blood and brains; another SS officer ripping a baby from the womb of a pregnant woman and smashing it against a wall. Let one such scene stand for many:

At the edge of a grave, a little girl about four years old came up and quietly took my hand. I tried to free myself, but she kept gripping it. In front of us they were shooting the Jews. "Gdye mama?" [Where is mama?] I asked the girl in Ukrainian. She pointed toward the trench. . . . "Come with me," I said to her in German, "don't be afraid, come." I headed for the entrance to the pit. . . . I picked her up and held her out to a Waffen-SS: "Be gentle with her," I said.

Mass murder - in Babi Yar near Kiev, 30,000 Jews were killed in a 24-hour period - is presented dispassionately. The SS officers consider the slaughter of Jews to be an unpleasant task, because of the muck and mud of the ravines and the soiling of their uniforms by the splattered blood and guts, but a necessary one. The official SS concerns center on precise statistics, the inefficiency of shooting the condemned one at a time, and the associated costs in man hours and ammunition. The central command instructs the officers that they are to "learn to destroy enemies in a systematic, efficient, carefully thought-out way."

Eventually, a gas truck is developed to exterminate women and children, but that too has its problems: The driver becomes nauseated by the fumes, and those assigned to evacuate the bodies have to deal with the stench of the defecation of terrified victims.

The SS officers, we learn, are just ordinary people with conventional concerns about home and family life - former tradesmen, teachers, and bureaucrats. Anti-Semitism was a part of their former daily lives, their upbringing, and they find nothing amiss about killing Jews.

This is how Littell's book indicts the brainless and brutal National Socialist ideology. Littell instructs us that evil need not necessarily appear in spectacular garb. Just the insipid conversations of ordinary people discussing logistical matters thoughtlessly may betray the darkness that lurks in the human heart.

It is not without good reason that the French original of this novel, titled Les Bienveillantes (2006), has been acclaimed and awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prize for a Novel by the French Academy, or that it has been the subject of ecstatic reviews and topped the best-seller lists in Europe. Its sweep from 1941 to 1945 across Poland and the then-Soviet Union, its lurid account of atrocities in the concentration camps, its detailed reporting on the rise and internecine struggles among nationalists in Ukraine, and the in-depth presentation of the languages, histories, and origins of various ethnic groups in the Caucasus region make this an important book.