SOURCE: "In the Maw of the Death Machine," in The New York Times Book Review, January 29, 1995, pp. 1, 25-6.

[Reich is a Polish-born American psychiatrist and nonfiction writer. In the following review of Lawrence L. Langer's Admitting the Holocaust and Art from the Ashes, he praises Langer for focusing on the physical reality of the Holocaust.]

During the last five decades, many writers have tried to make sense of the Holocaust through philosophical, religious, psychological, symbolic and literary formulations. Often, they have tried to find some good in that epoch of profound evil, some way of distilling hope, or at least consolation, from that vast sea of despair. They have struggled with the meaning of memory, the limits of spiritual strength, the rupture of history, the ontology of survival.

But in the process, they have too frequently lost sight of what actually happened, of how the suffering was actually...