Comprehending the Incomprehensible

Blood from the Sky
by Piotr Rawicz, translated by Peter Hays
Harcourt, Brace & World, 315 pp., $4.95

The Journey and the Pity
by Pawel Mayewski
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 178 pp., $1.65

The furor aroused by the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem may be evidence that the slaughter of the Jews during the course of Hitler’s Final Solution cannot be justly treated by the present generation of writers. Regardless of whether the description is sociological and philosophical, as in Miss Arendt’s case, or a fusion of fact and fantasy in a climate of other-worldliness, as in Blood from the Sky, the event itself is still touched with so much horror, despair, and guilt that any treatment seems ultimately inadequate.

Piotr Rawicz, a Ukrainian Jew who sur...