The Requisitions, Lopez-Barrantes, B+

              This novel about the Lodz Ghetto is a fascinating mixture of storytelling accompanied by thoughtful considerations and precise historical teachings. It is an excellent presentation of the horrors of the ghettos. Viktor is an elite, a professor who never knew his two Jewish grand parents, is half-Austrian, and proficient in both German and Polish. He is a known leftist who seems to stay away from trouble, and has potential usefulness to the occupiers as a translator. After a brutal Gestapo beating the first winter, he has survived for two years as an interpreter and statistician  for the Judenrat. The price he pays to survive is the daily participation in Jews condemning other Jews to death. On the night before the unannounced liquidation of the ghetto, the lives of Viktor,  a German women he had a brief flirtation with years ago, a German policeman, and a Jewish family hiding in the countryside come together in a dramatic unexplored denouement.