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Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising
by: Ian MacMillan

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780140290332
ISBN: 0140290338
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: April 01, 2000
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Release Date: April 03, 2000
Sales Rank: 712769
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
On August 2, 1943 prisoners of the Treblinka concentration camp, armed with stolen guns and grenades, attacked their guards, set fire to the 'factory of death,' and fled into the neighboring forest. Of the six hundred prisoners who escaped in the desperate revolt, only forty survived. Village of a Million Spirits is a fictionalized account of one of the most extraordinary insurrections in history.

With breathtaking intensity Ian MacMillan narrates the Treblinka uprising in the voices of people both inside the camp and in the surrounding countryside, children and adults, victims and guards. For its staggering depiction of horror and for its sheer humanity, Village of a Million Spirits should be considered, like the novels of Levi, Wiesel, Kosinski, and Borowski, essential reading in Holocaust literature.

'A new benchmark in Holocaust literature, distinguished by unflinching fidelity to truth, unsparing immediacy and literary resonance'-- Publishers Weekly, starred review

'Anyone who doubts that a work of literary art can sometimes come closer to truth than the report of an eyewitness should read this novel.'-- Los Angeles Times

'Thoroughly convincing... ruthlessly absorbing...in short, stands testament to the proposition that a well-chosen word can be worth a thousand pictures.'-- Jerusalem Post

Amazon.com Review:
Village of a Million Spirits is set in what one of its characters calls 'the most heavily populated quarter-square mile on earth'; the only difference, he tells us, is that '95 percent of the people were spirits.' That village is Treblinka, where Jewish prisoners--the lucky ones--cooperate in their own extinction, while those who are strong enough dream of revolt. Here we meet 14-year-old Janusz, whose genius lies in being nondescript; Anatoly, the Ukrainian guard with oversize ears and a burning hatred of his German superiors; Magda, Anatoly's girlfriend, who spends the entire novel giving birth to his child; and the German officer Voss, who drinks his way into an obsession with Jewish gold. All coexist in a camp rendered with nightmarish realism, their minds fixing on almost any detail that might provide a moment's relief: meaningless coincidences, the smell of pine sap, priceless stamps dropped in the snow.

Time after time, Ian MacMillan introduces a character only to lead him shortly afterwards to the door of a gas chamber--and in one case, beyond. The technique keeps us permanently off balance; we never know whether we're meeting someone who's about to die immediately, horribly, or someone who might make it through half the book. And yet, somehow the author is getting at the fundamental challenge facing all Holocaust literature. It's the problem of scale: At what point does it all become just a parade of corpses? How does one make the suffering particular without having the reader go numb? Yanking gold teeth from the mouths of gassed Jews, young Janusz keeps himself occupied by imagining their identities. It's the only way he can bring himself to face the abstraction of death on this scale: 'Each one is a person. Each has a past that is at least as complicated and abundant with memory as his own.' Every 20th or 30th tooth, he pops one into his mouth, holding it there while he works and later bartering the gold for weapons.

The uprising is doomed from the start, of course, but in a way, that's not the point. Just because it will fail doesn't mean it's not necessary. At one point, Janusz watches his friend dragged off to certain death. As he goes, Adam points steadily to his temple and then his eye, and Janusz realizes that his friend is giving him an order: 'that he, Janusz Siedlecki, should carry on, see, and remember, see and remember, see and remember.... All these people have been made to vanish from the earth, the reality of their existence wiped away, but for one thing: the presence of one person to see and remember.' The remarkable thing is, of course, that MacMillan was not there to see or remember--and nonetheless he makes us do both. --Mary Park

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Full of horror, yet avoids exploitation or sentiment
Many of the other reviewers have pointed out the strengths of this novel. Reading it--in one sitting--after the author's earlier 1981 collection Orbit of Darkness, I was impressed most with MacMillan's ability to shift into multiple characters and narrative shifts to circle around the year or so before the Treblinka revolt to keep my interest and avoid the neatly plotted historical novel. While his detachment may disappoint those looking for a conventional melodrama, he takes on the challenge of description of the body--and bodies--in an unsparingly clinical manner.

This fits the gaze required of the perpetrators and those who they forced to be its victims, for minutes before they were gassed, or for months before they perished as slave workers. By this clinical stance, MacMillan forces us to see the excavation of the bodies for burning as the Soviets threaten to near the camp as the Nazis slowly realize ... Read More

Rating:

- Astounding
Clearly, Stephen G. Esrati (review below) has an obsession with footnotes (a footnote fetish, if you will). Leave it to the "expertise" of a writer for stamp collectors to give such a ridiculously blind review of one of the most amazing books on the Holocaust ever written. Village of a Million Spirits is, quite simply, a mind-blowing account of the Treblinka revolt. Perhaps unlike Mr. Esrati, I have studied the Holocaust extensively, and I can confidently state that McMillan's book is based on ample research. VMS is a stirring, horrifying (yes, the Holocast was gruesome, Mr. Esrati - deal with it), and mesmirizing story. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Rating:

- Emphasis is on gruesome detail
MacMillan's book is a novel. In the interview that follows his story he says
he has not talked to anyone who was at Treblinka and has never been there.
He has done it all through reading. But, unlike Paul Erdman's books about
Switzerland's role in the Holocaust, MacMillan provides no footnotes. The
book screams for a treatment like Erdman's.
For example: We all know about the shipment of people packed tightly
together in boxcars, but MacMillan also describes a luxury train from
Vienna, on which the passengers, described as rich Jews, drink champagne.
The reader cries out: "Where did MacMillan get this idea from? Were there
such luxury trains from Vienna in October 1942?" The reader is left
wondering, having to trust that MacMillan has written a historical novel
that deals honestly with history even if all the characters except Kurt
Franz are fictional.
I ... Read More

Rating:

- Compelling and Necessary Reading
This book has forever shaped my imagery of the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Compelling, powerful, horrific beyond measure. An incredible journey into the recesses of hell. I don't know how the author was able to capture with such vivid portraiture the evil described, considering that he is not a survivor. A must-read.

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