Armageddon: Twenty Years After The Warsaw Uprising

To Dr. Isaac Schipper, the Polish-Jewish historian who was my closest neighbor in the potato-peeling brigade at the Maidanek concentration camp, I owe an insight which has haunted me ever since my stay there.

“There is no such thing as historical truth,” he would say with his sad smile when we dreamed about how after the war the survivors of the camps would tell the world the whole truth. “There is just interpretation,” he said. “It depends on who writes t...