Some weeks after the German invasion of Poland, the occupying forces established a series of ghettoes to segregate the country’s urban Jewish population. In the two years between the onset of World War II and the official endorsement of the extermination of European Jewry, these ghettoes were required to labour for the German war effort in exchange for food rations and medical supplies. Mordechai Rumkowski was appointed to oversee the Lodz ghetto; while other Jewish enclaves collaborated with local resistance forces, Rumkowski believed the best way to militate against Nazi wrath was to make his people indispensible to his masters. Because of his efforts, Lodz was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated. Yet Rumkowski committed unspeakable acts in the course of his duties, sanctioning the execution of his political opponents and sexually abusing young women in his care. For all his work ingratiating himself with the German leadership, Rumkowski could not spare himself and his charges from their fate at Auschwitz.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s novelisation of Lodz’s history is told alternately through the ever-present figure of Rumkowski and a series of vignettes around the ghetto’s inhabitants. Posing similarly unnerving existential questions to Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolf Eichmann, Sam-Sandberg is primarily concerned with the moral ambiguities of Rumkowski’s character – was he simply intoxicated by the dictatorial power he wielded over the ghetto, or did he remain loyal to his belief that collaboration with the Nazis would save his people from the gas chambers?

Evoking any sympathy for such an odious character is beyond even Sam-Sandberg’s masterful prose, and the novel’s tenor is ultimately one of emotional deadening: every round of deportations, every brutal suppression of the ghetto’s residents and every spiteful or predatory whim exercised by Rumkowski becomes progressively less affecting to the reader. In this regard, Sam-Sandberg’s ultimate talent is recreating the same casual disregard for human life that permitted the Holocaust to occur. An unsettling masterpiece.

Sean Gleeson is a freelance reviewer.