Jean-François Steiner


Jean-François Steiner is a French-Jewish writer born on 17 February 1938 in Paris, France. He is the son of Kadmi Cohen, a French lawyer and writer who died at the concentration camp of Gleiwitz. In 1952 he was adopted, together with his sister Josée Steiner and elder brother Olivier Cohen-Steiner by his mother's second husband, a physician.
He is best known for his controversial non-fiction novel Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp first published in 1966 as Treblinka: la révolte d'un camp d'extermination; translated a year later by Helen Weaver for Simon & Schuster. Written in the first person, the book blames members of the Jewish Sonderkommando for assisting the German SS in perpetrating a genocide. Following outrage among French, Jewish and foreign academics, Steiner agreed to republish his book, by presenting it as a fictional account of the Treblinka extermination camp operation. The book remains very popular in France.

''Treblinka''

When asked upon the publication of his book why death camps such as Treblinka had been 'avoided' by his own French contemporaries, Steiner replied: "In Treblinka, as in all the other extermination camps, the Germans had designed 'the machine' in such a way that it would almost run itself. It is the Jews who did everything." Professor Samuel Moyn in his Treblinka Affair explained that Steiner claimed to direct his non-fiction novel at the "problem" of the Jews' complicity in a manner reminiscent of parts of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews or Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Works