The Seventh Cross

NOBLE simplicity of style and story, relentless march of incident, and complete absence of comment make this novel of pre-war Nazi Germany intensely engrossing and powerfully moving. Seven men escape from the concentration camp at Westhofen; the commander of the camp prepares seven trees as crosses on which to punish them when they are recaptured, the seventh cross being reserved for George Heisler, the report of whose evasion of the Gestapo is given in day-by-day detail. But this simple machinery, so breathlessly exciting in the narration, overlies depth below depth of human heroism and depravity. The author’s calm reticence makes her exposure of the Hitler regime of a decade ago all the more terrible and final. While reading, one is aware only of how the presence of danger tests character, how infinitely resourceful man can be when hunted, and how precarious any despotism must be as long as even one brave man defies it. This last idea may, in fact, be the unstressed theme and meaning of the story; for more than once the author implies that totalitarianism that is not total has simply failed. As long as there is a seventh cross unoccupied, even Hitler himself must be afraid. R. M. G.