Behind Barbed Wire

SPARK OF LIFE (365 pp.)--Erich Maria Remarque -- Applefon-Century-Crofts ($3.75).

Herr Roller, known in the concentration camp only as 509, lay on the ground in the mild March sunshine. He was wearing the outer clothing of three men on top of his own, yet he was cold. Perhaps it was because he was so thin--5 ft. 10 and under 80 pounds. Below the hill on which ie lay, the pleasant old German town poked orderly and serene. Then the Allied bombardment began.

One bomb sent the whole railway station right up into the air, its golden cupola sailing over the trees. Another wrecked St. Catherine's Church. Watching from )behind the barbed wire of the concentration camp, 509 felt a sudden soaring of .he spirit. He crawled toward the camp barrack, determined to stay alive.

In Spark of Life, Novelist Erich (All

Quiet on the Western Front) Remarque

ries hard to write about something he knows only from the distance. A U.S. citizen now (he quit Germany in 1933), he had a look at what remains of Dachau and other concentration camps on a trip last year. But he has had to imagine his camp, Mellern, under the Nazis. Instead of the eyewitness experience that served him so well in All Quiet and The Road Back, he has delved into official reports and the eyewitness accounts of others. To suffer imaginatively the experience of the victims and mold it into a novel would require a modern Dostoevsky. Novelist Remarque can only be given good marks for an honorable try.

Mellern did not have a gas chamber, but it had a crematorium and it worked overtime. Fat Obersturmbannfuehrer Neubauer, the camp's director, had a chauffeured Mercedes, a Hitler mustache and a good stock of real cigars. He had persuaded himself that his was the most "humane" camp in the Third Reich. Weber, the assistant who actually ran Mellern, despised such sentiments; he frankly enjoyed turning living skeletons into dead ones.

Spark of Life describes Mellern during the last few weeks of the war. It is the now familiar picture of men tortured beyond endurance, of torturers drugged with their own sadism. Starving men like 509 were continually on the edge of death; it was a daily surprise to wake up alive. Then the bombings and the approach of the Allies fanned the spark of life and gave a few of them the courage to hold on. No. 509 tried too, but he did not quite make it.

Perhaps Author Remarque has tried to write his story too soon. Most likely, the enormity of the crime he tries to dramatize has swamped him. His story of faceless victims and soulless destroyers occasionally enrages the mind; it seldom engages the heart.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.