More Lessons From an Unending Horror : THE BOOK AND THE SWORD: A Life of Learning in the Throes of the Holocaust by David Weiss Halivni; Farrar, Straus and Giroux $21, 196 pages : RUMORS AND STONES: A Journey by Wayne Karlin; Curbstone Press $19.95, 226 pages

Nazi Germany may have succeeded in murdering 6 million Jewish men, women and children, but they failed in their real mission--the obliteration of Jewish history and memory. The monument to the victory of the victims over their oppressors is the sizable and growing literature of the Holocaust, which is still capable of surprising and enriching us a half-century after the fact.

“The Book and the Sword” is the memoir of Talmudic scholar David Weiss Halivni, a professor of religion at Columbia, who recalls his own childhood in a place called Sighet, a Jewish community in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, his miraculous survival in the slave labor camps and death camps of the Holocaust, and his own post-war resurrection as a modern Jewish sage.

“Rumors and Stones” is the account of a journey taken by an American Jew and Vietnam veteran named Wayne Karlin to the Polish village where his relatives were machine-gunned to death by a Nazi extermination squad in 1941--”an image,” Karlin writes, “that became linked in my mind with My Lai.”

Halivni’s book is surprisingly rich and resonant, a page from a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer come fully alive. The author was a child prodigy who was ordained at the age of 15, and his first pulpit, so to speak, was inside the barbed wire fence of a concentration camp. Indeed, Halivni gives us the very moment when he and his beloved grandfather stood before the notorious Josef Mengele at Auschwitz--Mengele sent his grandfather to the gas chamber but the young Halivni was spared for slave labor.

Still, the smoke of the crematories hangs over the otherwise sunny landscape of Halivni’s childhood. He recalls with pleasure, for example, that dogs “were popular with the rabbis of the Talmud,” who preserved a tradition that “when the dogs frolic it is a sign that Elijah the prophet has come to town.” And yet he pauses to recall that his own father was savaged to death by the dogs of the SS.

Karlin, American-born and a generation younger than Halivni, deals with the Holocaust as Halivni himself might approach a page from the Talmud--it is a text to be studied and pondered. Karlin’s childhood was spent in the safety and comfort of the New World, and yet the shadow of the death camps hung over his family too: “My fantasy life,” Karlin writes, “wrapped itself around slaughter and resistance.”

But Karlin’s own combat experience was in Vietnam rather than Europe, and his book is a tough and yet somehow prayerful study of these two episodes of violence and pain in human history. His journey back to the Polish town from which his mother escaped is an edgy sort of pilgrimage, and the account of what he saw in Vietnam and what he saw in Poland is a work of alchemy that, at moments, turns memory into poetry.

“I had taken along the reading list for the perfect Jewish neurotic’s holiday, a literal guilt trip,” writes Karlin, whose airline reading included both Holocaust memoirs and a book about the massacre at My Lai. “The words and images they formed merged in my mind and mingled under what I was seeing and feeling in another kind of nightmarish Talmudic commentary.”

Among a hundred poignant and painful moments in these two books, the one that made the deepest impression on me is the story that Halivni tells of an experience at the construction site of an underground munitions factory. Deprived of every remnant of Jewish ritual or scholarship, young Halivni continued to study the Torah and the Talmud strictly from memory--and then, one day, he noticed that a Nazi guard had wrapped a greasy sandwich in a page ripped from a book of rabbinical commentary.

“Upon seeing this wrapper, I instinctively fell at the feet of the guard,” recalls Halivni, who begged his captor for the scrap of paper. At first, the guard put his hand to the revolver, then relented and handed the grease-stained page to his prisoner. “I took it back to the camp. On the Sundays we had off, we now had not only Oral Torah but Written Torah as well.”

Halivni’s book opens with an epigram: “For those who walked upon the ramp of Auschwitz, the Holocaust is not over.” And the essential point of these two books is that the Holocaust will never be over because, in a real sense, what happened in the camps and the killing pits has become a benchmark against which all human suffering can be measured.