A lost novel from 1943 predicted the Holocaust. Now, it has been recovered.

JTA – As World War II raged in Europe, Friedrich Torberg, an Austrian Jew who fled for the United States in 1940, imagined what was befalling the Jews he left behind. 

Torberg recorded his image of a German concentration camp in Mein ist die Rache, or Vengeance is Mine, a novel published in 1943. It was one of the earliest pieces of fiction about the Holocaust, written while the Final Solution was being carried out and decades before the capitalised “Holocaust” entered common parlance. 

But Torberg, a budding star on Vienna’s literary scene, was estranged from his destroyed continent when the book came out in Los Angeles. Though acclaimed in his small circle of German émigrés, the book was never published in English. It soon went out of print and fell into obscurity. 

That is until now. The first English translation of Vengeance is Mine was published last week by Boiler House Press, based at the University of East Anglia, as part of a series dedicated to forgotten books. It was translated by Stephanie Gorell Ortega. 

“When I came across it, I thought, ‘My gosh, this sounds so fascinating’,” said Brad Bigelow, who edits the “Recovered Books” series. “How is it that this book never got translated and it just got overlooked?” 

Torberg’s novella, set in November 1940, opens with a nameless narrator waiting on a New Jersey pier for a ship carrying friends from Europe. For the fourth time, he sees a haggard man who waits there each day and leaves each day alone. That man explains he is waiting not for one or two people, but for 75 Jews who never arrive. 

As they speak at a bar, this man becomes the second narrator. He tells of his time in the fictional Heidenburg concentration camp, where the commandant, Hermann Wagenseil, tortures Jewish prisoners one by one. Wagenseil’s method is to isolate a prisoner, philosophically lay out his reasons for liquidating the Jews, and physically and mentally drive each man to the point of taking his own life. 

In the “Jew Barracks”, the prisoners debate their own philosophies about how to respond to their systematic destruction. They ask whether G-d intends them to surrender to their fate, leaving vengeance in His hands, or to attempt saving themselves. 

Torberg himself was never in a concentration camp. He was in Prague when the Germans marched into Austria in 1938. He continued to evade them in France, and then, when France surrendered to Germany, fled through Spain and Portugal. He obtained a visa for the United States through the Emergency Rescue Committee, a US organisation that saved thousands of artists and intellectuals, and ended up in Los Angeles. 

For his novella, Torberg could consult reports from eyewitnesses who escaped camps in the 1930s. But his fictional camp predicted what would not be fully understood until later – how Nazi ideology produced a system of mass extermination, not only through what came to be known as an “industrial” genocide of gas chambers, but also through the immense repetition of personal, intimate murders. 

“Torberg saw the logical end of where the Nazis were going with their repression of the Jews,” Bigelow said. “It did go that way, but he didn’t know that it was going that way. Nobody knew that it was going to be six million, that it would be such a massive programme, sucking up Jews all over occupied Europe.” 

The unease of the narration, refracted through second-hand accounts, was more than a fictional device. Like the man waiting for the ship that never comes, Torberg could not know who would survive. While he was writing the book, he was losing at least 15 members of his family, including his mother and sister. 

Mein ist die Rache was first published by Pazifische Presse, a small German exile press in Santa Monica that existed from 1942 to 1948. Pazifische Presse published authors who were persecuted by the Nazis, among them international giants such as Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, and Alfred Döblin. 

Torberg’s book was lauded by other exiled intellectuals. Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front and a friend of Torberg’s, called it “electrifying”. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the Austrian composer and socialite, said she read it “with feverish excitement and, at the end, with great satisfaction”. But its circulation dwindled around 2 000 copies. 

In 1947, a Viennese publisher released it for the first time in Europe. Again the book was praised by critics, but readers showed meagre interest and it fell out of print. 

The years after World War II saw the genre of Holocaust literature emerge as a complex outgrowth of survivor testimonies. Nearly two decades after Vengeance is Mine, Elie Wiesel’s Night – a blend of memoir and novel by the Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor – was published in the United States in 1960. Wiesel, too, failed to find a wide readership, with the English edition at first selling only 3 000 copies. It was only decades later that Night sold millions of copies and became a cornerstone of Holocaust education in US schools. 

Torberg returned to Austria in 1951, and he wrote little for the next 20 years. He would become best known for a collection of stories about the vanished Jewish world of his childhood, Tante Jolesch, or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes, published in 1975. These anecdotes were full of eccentric characters who shared a distinct Jewish humour. Torberg called it a “book of melancholy”. 

Vengeance is Mine is wholly unlike the Tante Jolesch stories and the rest of Torberg’s oeuvre, according to Bigelow. But he hopes that now, through an English translation, the book will finally have its moment to resonate with American readers. 

“I think in the context of what’s going on in the United States right now, it’s an important book in raising that question about resistance to oppression,” said Bigelow.