The Ashes of 0 Warsaw

THE WALL (632 pp.)--John Mersey--Knopf ($4).

The wall of John Hersey's title is the one built by the Germans around Warsaw's Jewish quarter during their wartime occupation; his story is the slow extermination of the people caught inside it; his theme the breaking down of the self-built wall of passive meekness which has so long enclosed European Jewry in the invisible prison of the ghetto mind.

Warsaw's Jews first thought that the Nazis' coming meant" no more than a switch of anti-Semitic rulers. The book describes their slow wakening to the realities of race murder as the Germans first wall them in, then wipe them out, block by block. At its opening the trapped Jews are living normal city lives; at its close they can take a crying baby from its mother's breast and kill it, for fear of the Germans who are searching for hidden survivors. The book ends, symbolically, with a group of ghetto men, liberated from their trap, meeting the new kind of Jew, the suntanned fighting partisan, in the open country far outside the city.

Wrath & Terror. Unhappily, Author Hersey chooses to tell the story in novel form, and employs one of the oldest and least effective technical tricks for giving fiction the authentic tang of fact: he pretends that he is merely the editor of papers written by Eyewitness Noach Levinson. This gabbiest of notetakers is supposed to have lived out the days of wrath and terror pen in hand, documenting the horror minute by minute, until he had built up a jumbo collection of manuscript and clippings filling 17 iron boxes and a number of parcels. These he buried before slipping away through the city's sewers as the Germans finally closed in. The improbability of this archive, in the circumstances, is stressed by an introduction in which Author Hersey tries to establish the reality of Chronicler Noach. Publisher Knopf, seemingly fearful that some readers might believe every word of it, prints a brief introduction to the introduction, pointing out that the " 'archive' is a hoax." These opening solemnities give all the convincing qualities of a three-dollar bill to what actually is an account of one of the great tragedies of modern Europe.

Author Hersey makes a point of his editorial integrity in letting his character Noach have his own say in his own way, but an editor really on the job would have cut the story by a third or quarter to make it that much more direct and that much more moving. As it stands, gabby Noach. too introspective to give a clear account of action, and too intellectual to understand the urgent, passionate movements of the human heart, bores the reader into indifference. An effective criticism of the book and evidence of one character's sound common sense appears on the next-to-last page: "Rachel has been trying to get me to stop writing. But I have some more to put down. Is this the second day? The third day? I have been writing steadily. There is a kind of fog at the edges of my field of vision . . ." Author Hersey would have been well-advised to get out from behind befogged Noach's thick-lensed spectacles long before, to show his readers Warsaw seen through his own clear eyes.

Time & Changes. In Hiroshima, Author Hersey turned in one of the best pieces of factual reporting in many a day and in his earlier novel, A Bell for Adano, he achieved a considerable success in the field of fictional treatment of fact in which The Wall is a failure. Comparison of the three gives some measure of his gifts and shortcomings. A Bell for Adano's strength was its immediate relevance to a situation faced by the Allied Military Government in Italy. Time and changes in the situation have worn much of the book's luster away. Author Hersey's gift is that of the true newspaperman: the ability to report, on the scene and under pressure, the feelings, happenings, circumstances and significance of the moment.

Working over the cold ashes of Warsaw, on what is in the news sense a dead story, Author Hersey is venturing into the medium of another kind of writer altogether. He is not the first highly skilled reporter to stumble when he tries to create human characters on the correspondent's trusty typewriter.

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