Vengeance is Mine

Long

A Jewish prisoner, beaten and abused by his captors, finds himself alone with his concentration camp commandant. The commandant's back is turned. His pistol lies within reach. What should the prisoner do?

Written in 1943 while Friedrich Torberg, a Viennese Jew, was living in exile in California, Vengeance is Mine is the first English translation of one of the earliest works of Holocaust fiction. In it, Torberg grapples with a choice facing concentration camp inmates: comply and suffer? Or resist and risk immediate death?

Torberg wrote this novel before the Nazi implementation of the Final Solution was known in America, yet he recognized that elimination of the Jews was behind even the initial actions of the men running the early concentration camps. Though reliant entirely on the accounts of a few escapees and survivors, Torbert penetrated the minds of both prisoner and captor and created a spare, riveting narrative that seizes the reader in a vise-like grip and leaves questions that compel discussion long afterwards.