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 (1892–1944), 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. The book is a semi-fictional attempt to layout the logic of the Nazi concentration camp system and the experiences of the victims who eventually succeeded in revolting against their exterminators in the Treblinka camp. It is written in a third person almost-omniscient way, as the author tries to tie the behavioral conditioning used on the Jews to the narrative perspective of those who endured the violent human experiment. Following outrage among French, Jewish and foreign academics, Steiner agreed to republish his book (which became a bestseller), by presenting it as a fictional account of the Treblinka extermination camp operation. The book remains very popular in France. Provided by Wikipedia