BOOK REVIEW / HISTORY : A Post-Holocaust Search for Revenge : AN EYE FOR AN EYE: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 <i> by John Sack</i> ; Basic Books, $23, 252 pages

John Sack’s “An Eye for an Eye” recounts an episode in the roll-call of horrors triggered by the Holocaust: the hunting down and rounding up of German men, women and children stranded in Poland at the end of World War II, as well as of Germans living in what had been German Silesia.

While the story of how the Polish Office of State Security interned some German war criminals, tried others and let still others be beaten, tortured and starved has been officially documented, Sack gives his own spin to these events.

The atrocities occurred after the collapse of Germany and the de facto occupation of Poland by Russian forces. The Soviets erected what came to be known as the Iron Curtain dividing East from West, and established a communist puppet state in Poland.

As part of the new map of Europe, a slice of eastern Poland went to Russia, and in compensation the Poles received that part of eastern Germany known as Silesia.

Sack explains that he began his research to find out the truth about Lola Potok, a Polish Jew who was 18 when Germany invaded in 1939, 22 when she was sent to Auschwitz where she lost her year-old daughter to the ovens, and 24 when the war ended and she became, temporarily, commandant of an internment camp for Germans.

When Sack finally met Lola she filled audio tapes with recollections of her pre-war life in Bedzin, a small city just over the then-border with Germany, where she was the youngest of 11 children in a middle-class home. She then described her life in Auschwitz and finally, her post-war role collecting former SS officers for trial.

During a window of about six months in 1945, a remnant of those Jews who had survived found each other, and the Soviet controlled puppet government in Warsaw found them too. The new leaders sought both Jewish and Polish camp survivors as their henchmen. Lola was one of them. Named a commandant of a prison camp for war criminals, she vowed to do to the SS “what they did to us at Auschwitz.”

Filled with anger and hatred, Lola had been in a state akin to shell-shock in that summer of 1945. But after a few months she, and most of the others who had been enlisted in the Office of State Security, saw the madness and hollowness of their actions and escaped to the West.

Between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans died in Poland at the end of the war. But it is a distortion of the evidence to call this “Jewish revenge.” Those who died during Lola’s watch were victims of Jews and Poles acting alone--there was no Polish or Jewish conspiracy.

Moreover, the most harrowing episode Sack recounts concerns a camp where there is no evidence that Jews were involved at all; the commandant, for one, was a Polish Catholic.

A seasoned journalist, Sack has woven together Lola’s memories with interviews of her sister-in-law and other camp survivors to re-create the sense of anarchy and bitterness of those terrible days. Most problematically, Sack, in his eagerness to attribute blame for the German deaths, distorts the numbers of Jews employed by the Polish Office of State Security; he suggests that 75% of the factotums were Jews, rather than the 1.7% calculated by leading Holocaust scholars.

Sack’s personal conflicts pepper the text as he explains his own Polish-Jewish roots and insists that the reader know how observant he is.

Lola’s sins are not enough for him. He even draws comparisons between the people killed at Hiroshima and the Germans he says fell victim to this handful of Polish Jews. Sack gives the impression that he needs to believe that the Jews took revenge because he wishes they had.

Sack criticizes Lola and other postwar camp officials, pointing out the Talmud’s teaching that revenge is wrong (“an eye for an eye” is theologically inaccurate). At the same time, though, he glories in the phrase and takes a vicarious satisfaction in Lola’s behavior.