JTA — As World War II raged in Europe, Friedrich Torberg, an Austrian Jew who fled to the United States in 1940, imagined what was befalling the Jews he left behind.

Torberg recorded his image of a German concentration camp in “Mein ist die Rache,” or “Vengeance is Mine,” a novel published in 1943. It was one of the earliest pieces of fiction about the Holocaust, written while the Final Solution was being carried out and decades before the capitalized “Holocaust” entered common parlance.

But Torberg, a budding star on Vienna’s literary scene, was estranged from his destroyed continent when the book came out in Los Angeles. Though acclaimed in his small circle of German emigrés, the book was never published in English. It soon went out of print and fell into obscurity.

That is until now. The first English translation of “Vengeance is Mine” was published on Tuesday by Boiler House Press, based at the University of East Anglia, as part of a series dedicated to forgotten books. It was translated by Stephanie Gorell Ortega.

“When I came across it, I thought, ‘My gosh, this sounds so fascinating,’” said Brad Bigelow, who edits the “Recovered Books” series. “How is that this book never got translated and it just got overlooked?’”

Torberg’s novella, set in November 1940, opens with a nameless narrator waiting on a New Jersey pier for a ship carrying friends from Europe. For the fourth time, he sees a haggard man who waits there each day and leaves each day alone. That man explains he is waiting, not for one or two people, but for 75 Jews who never arrive.

As they speak at a bar, this man becomes the second narrator. He tells of his time in the fictional Heidenburg concentration camp, where the commandant, Hermann Wagenseil, tortures Jewish prisoners one by one. Wagenseil’s method is to isolate a prisoner, philosophically lay out his reasons for liquidating the Jews, and physically and mentally drive each man to the point of taking his........

© The Times of Israel