Tabori is obsessed with the horror of Hitlerism. Nearly all his writing deals with Fascist savagery…. One of the merits of The Cannibals is that in it Tabori has disgorged the very essence of that which torments him. He has also strived to make a statement beyond the bloody events.

Even in the midst of hell, Tabori tells us, where because of intense suffering everything becomes possible, a few men are able to retain the remnants of their stature as human beings. The starved inmates of a prison camp choose to go quietly to their death rather than (on the orders of their Nazi overseer) to eat the grotesque fellow prisoner whom most of them have joined in killing. Two men consent to eat, they are the survivors who later become prosperous American citizens.

The fault here is not the atrociousness of the material nor even the fact...