"How is it possible that Franz Stangl, a kindly, unassuming, mild-mannered family man and policeman from the small Austrian city of Linz became the commandant of the Nazi death camp Treblinka, where he wore white riding breaches to oversee mass murders of Jews? Gitta Sereny conducts her months of interviews of him in prison—as well as interviews with his wife and acquaintances—with her customary decorum, intelligence, and respect. One of her many outstanding strengths as a journalist is that she is entirely committed to understanding her subjects rather than demonstrating that she and her readers are unassailably superior."

"Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th Century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Not that he didn’t hope to write and publish more. The life of this Galician Jew was cut short when he was shot dead in the streets of Drohobych in a tit-for-tat between German officers of the occupying Nazi force. What survives is the people and other beings of the ghetto Schulz made eternal and universal in a text where everything has the right to respect, even a tailor’s dummy."