Village of a Million Spirits by Ian McMillan

Horror.  Ian Macmillan has revealed true horror.  In his 1999 novel Village of a Million Spirits he transports the reader into a primitive production line of death, Treblinka.  

 Set in eastern Poland in 1943 and 1944—during the year of the camp’s existence—the reader is introduced to the SS, their collaborators, local Poles, and “work Jews” whose detail includes stripping bodies of every conceivable valuable—teeth, hair, rings, stamps, and cash.   The "work Jews" are forced, under pain of death, to dispose of their own families and tens and thousands of bodies.  Some scholars argue a million people died in Treblinka's remote and subsequently destroyed cite, teams of workers reducing the evidence to “bones and gold.”

Simon Schama sent up a warning flare about excessive or at least indulgent use of graphic horror in his Financial Times review of the 2011 novel Emperor of Lies.  What Schama argued was at that "tedious" novel's core was an "emotional void."  And with the amazing histories and diaries from Lodz, Schama argues that the event was unnecessary to fictionalize.
Meanwhile, the traces of Treblinka are now all but rubbed out.  To date, only two of the death camp's inmates survive.  Nothing of the camp remains except a rock memorial.  Claud Lanzmann's Shoah excellently chronicled the camp, using interviews with survivors and guards.  Even recent documentaries ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xnAWWlf_RE) gives new insight and perspective. 

McMillan's novel is brutal, to be sure.  Little is spared but the author does not seem to relish the horror.  Instead, the work allows characters to respond to the horrors as a way of demonstrating the effects of the black world of the camp.  As the Russians approach after the collapse of the Eastern Front at Stalingrad the Germans busily prepare for the end.  Deep death pits are transformed into “grills” used to “roast” the traces of the enormity.   

McMillan offers an arc from the transport, the Himmelstrasse or "road to heaven," and to the pits; from inmates and guards; from survivors, sadists and cynics. It was a hell run by gangsters and populated with broken and terrified men.   

Kurt Franz, a real-life Nazi nicknamed “The Doll” because of his beautiful face, joyfully murders inmates with his dog and takes special pleasure in his “work.”  Other fictional characters, such as Voss, represent the conniving and completely selfish motives of fascist functionaries.  Voss, whose face is a “swollen mask of alcoholic poisoning,” is not a true believer in some Jedeo-Bolshevist plutocracy.  He’s an opportunist; a thief and a war profiteer, nothing more.  Most terrifying  is Schenck who reveals that inside Treblinka—a “wonderland of nightmares”—sadists enjoyed absolute freedom.  Considering the Taiping Rebellion—a civil war that consumed million—during his nightly boredom, Schenck muses:  “How many of us remember that?”

Treblinka became, writes McMillann, a place where “even shame is dead—it hardly even prickles the skin.”  Starved and half-delirious with fear and disease, the “work Jews” cheer after a slump in “transports,” even while their own families burn in the nightly pyres.  The Germans and their collaborators don’t just rob them of their families and goods they rip out the ability to feel.  After his family is murdered, one character realizes he is alone:  “…his attitude should be some kind of grief, but he does not feel grief.  He feels hunger, and thirst, and his skis is irritated with dirt and sour body oil.”

One of them, Janusz is slight and ignored, allowing him to steal in preparation of an armed rebellion.  McMillan mentions, though does not focus on, real characters like Rudolf Masarek, who planned and initiated the rebellion.  Meanwhile, characters like the Ukranian guard, Anatoly, whose Polish girlfriend is pregnant, smuggles the Jews guns.  He hates the Germans—though his presence represents the fact of widespread and brutal fascist collaboration. 

When Janusz enters the camp, Treblinka is not the efficient factory that Auschwitz became.  Bodies lie in the road and SS guards do not take great care to deceive Jews about their fate.  Instead of arbeit macht frei, horrified passengers are greeted by mauling dogs and the truncheon.  Before Janusz is separated from his family, his grandmother thinks, “The guards have apparently struck (the children) as they passed.  It occurs to her that such meanness could indicate that they never had any intention of killing them.  Mistreatment makes little sense.”   

Treblinka was not the efficient factory of death that Auschwitz became.  Its early leaders were inefficient and sloppy.  Bodies piled up and whole transports were left in gas chambers to suffocate—not because of purposeful brutality in this case—but because guards simply forgot about them.  With a change in leadership, Treblinka is “beautified” with paths and flowers and a new goal of orderly, efficient killing.  Even the death pits are sprinkled with flower seeds.

Janusz cares for others in the camp, nicking gold and offering candy to his comrades.  Though, they don’t understand why he does it, considering his behavior irrational and almost inappropriate considering the circumstances.  And in collaboration with another inmate, Dr. Herzennberg, Janusz picks gold and goods from the bodies—even becoming a “dentist” removing the teeth from corpses—and prepares for escape. 

Hovering over each page is the real feeling of doubt that no revolt will occur, the miserable inertia of survival will roll out into death atop the pyres.  McMillan excellently transports you into the experience of those wedged in the vice of fear and those beyond its clutches.  

 Treblinka’s guards have only contempt for the Jews, a people with “fatalistic resignation.”  For the Ukranian Anatoly, the Jews “seem to him like pigs in a slaughterhouse yard, gazing at the fence and scheming while, one by one, they are butchered.”  Even the inmates doubt that their liberation will come, some choose suicide or a trip “to the hospital” a pit with a rude shack front and bogus Red Cross flag. 

But in the broiling hours of August, 1943, a few dozen starving prisoners fight back.